is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular and bestselling novelists. Her writing was an instant success with readers worldwide. Since her first book, Bittersweet Passion, was published in 1987, she has gone from strength to strength and now has over ninety titles, which have sold more than thirty-five million copies, to her name.

In this special collection, we offer readers a chance to revisit favourite books or enjoy that rare treasure—a book by a favourite writer—they may have missed. In every case, seduction and passion with a gorgeous, irresistible man are guaranteed!

LYNNE GRAHAM was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen Mills & Boon® reader since her teens. She is very happily married, with an understanding husband who has learned to cook since she started to write! Her five children keep her on her toes. She has a very large dog, which knocks everything over, a very small terrier, which barks a lot, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.

A Vengeful Passion

Lynne Graham

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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 joyrider. 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’t’s’ 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 beserk 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’s 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.’ Arnold hesitated. ‘And, much as I love my wife, I find it ridiculous 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 Cavalieris 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 in 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 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 na;auive 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 her 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 na;auive 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, mindbending 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 fa;alcade 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 demeaningly humble to her own ears.

CHAPTER TWO

‘I’M SURE you’ll understand that I’m not being rude when I ask you to be brief.’

Vito indicated the chair placed in readiness about six feet from the desk. If his secretary had stepped forward with a blindfold, Ashley wouldn’t have been surprised. ‘I’ll be as brief as possible.’

A satiric black brow elevated. ‘Bearing in mind that I have no desire to hear a plea for clemency on your brother’s behalf.’

Crushed before she could even warm up, Ashley was relieved when a phone buzzed and he stretched out an impatient hand. As his attention switched from her, she breathed again. The temptation to study him was overpowering. He was incredibly attractive. Hard cheekbones slashed his strong, dark features, highlighting the proud temperamental flare of his nose and a mouth that was a wide, blatantly sensual arc. But, if you were a woman, it was the eyes you noticed first and remembered longest. Vito had stunningly beautiful eyes, golden as the purest precious metal in sunlight or dark as darkest ebony.

In defiance of her every wish to the contrary, Vito still radiated a dark, savage sexuality boldly at variance with a three-piece suit and a silk tie. Every woman between fifteen and fifty raised her chin and sucked in her stomach when Vito passed. And she was not, she learnt, dragging her disobedient eyes from him, the exception that broke the rule.

As she lowered her lashes, her skin heated. A tiny pulse at the base of her throat was racing. She was badly shaken by her adolescent response to all that raw, blatant masculinity. Anger followed predictably in the wake of that lowering awareness. He replaced the phone, uttering a bland apology for the interruption.

‘You want me to get down on my knees and beg, don’t you?’ As the hot, thoughtless words burst from her, shrill with resentment, she could have bitten her tongue out for that loss of control.

Vito lounged back in his swivel chair, insultingly unsurprised by the verbal assault. Far too perceptive eyes of gold ran over her flushed face. ‘Exactly why are you here?’ he asked, politely ignoring her outburst.

‘To talk about Tim and why he did it. You’re probably not aware of it, but your nephew—’

Vito dealt her a narrowed glance. ‘Insulted you to your brother?’ he interposed. ‘It was a regrettable incident.’

Ashley stiffened. ‘Regrettable?’

‘Pietro lost two of his front teeth,’ Vito returned drily. ‘The question of family loyalties was settled with their fists. Pietro came off worst and he has been honest with me. I see no connection between that episode and your brother’s inexcusable invasion of my home.’

‘So you had chapter and verse on Act One. What about Act Two?’ Ashley pressed with spirit. ‘Tim was cornered outside school and beaten up by four boys, one of whom was your nephew.’

‘When did this take place?’

Ashley had to think for a second or two before slinging the date at him with relish.

‘On that day, Pietro was attending his cousin’s wedding in Rome,’ Vito responded even more drily. ‘He could not possibly have been present.’

Her chin came up. ‘If he wasn’t there, he organised it.’

Vito set the gold pen in his hand very decisively down on the glass desktop. ‘You are now entering the realms of fantasy. Pietro would not have involved himself in so cowardly an act. Unless you have evidence on which to base these allegations, I would advise you to drop this line of argument.’ Ice cool dark eyes rested on her. ‘Pursue it and you will find it a most unproductive course.’

She was furious that she did not possess the exact details of that incident. Four youths had attacked Tim. That was the sum total of her knowledge. She ground her teeth together on an explosive retort. The atmosphere had all the encouraging warmth of a polar freeze. Biting her lower lip, she murmured, ‘I understand that the enmity between your nephew and my brother originally related to some rivalry over a girl—’

His sculpted bone-structure set. ‘And what possible relevance does that information have to the current situation?’

Ashley stiffened. ‘The connection is pretty obvious from where I’m sitting!’

‘Then we would appear to be seated in very different positions,’ Vito drawled with biting sarcasm. ‘I fail to see the smallest connection.’

‘You’re not prepared to allow me anything, are you?’ she snapped back at him, her temper simmering.

A chilling smile formed on his lips. ‘But then, in your place, I would have come through that door and endeavoured to make what apology I could for such conduct. Your sole reason for being here appears to be a blind determination to foist some measure of blame upon Pietro or, indeed, upon some unknown girl,’ he delineated with sardonic emphasis. ‘If that were not so contemptible, I would be entertained by your efforts to excuse the inexcusable.’

A red-hot flush climbed with painful slowness beneath her translucent skin. Her approach had been all wrong. She didn’t need him to tell her that. Vito, hatefully polished veteran of many a brilliant diplomatic manoeuvre. Just entering this office had taken every shred of courage in her armoury. Under threat, Ashley went on the offensive. If Vito had been decent enough to see her earlier, she could have controlled that flaw in her own make-up. But Vito had made her suffer through an agonising morning of uncertainty, adding to her stress and strain. Vito had successfully smashed her composure before she even walked into this room.

‘I was…I am very upset,’ Ashley reasoned tautly. ‘Tim’s been under considerable pressure recently with his exams so close. I simply wanted you to have a clearer picture of his state of mind.’

‘But I have not the remotest interest in his state of mind,’ Vito said without a flicker of emotion. ‘He is neither a child nor a mental incompetent. He is responsible for his own actions.’

She focused on a point safely to the left of him. This was it. This was her cue to explain why Tim had reacted so violently to Pietro’s taunts. This was her cue to tell Vito that their relationship had, in the messy aftermath of their break-up, extracted a heavy toll from her future. But how could she possibly manage to tell Vito about her pregnancy? Vito, of all people? How on earth could she discuss something that was so deeply personal a grief that she had never yet managed to discuss it with anyone?

In a weak moment she had allowed Susan to know that she was carrying Vito’s child. She had trusted Susan to be careful with that information. She should have known better. Her father had overheard Susan and Arnold talking about her pregnancy and the secret had been out with a vengeance!

Hunt Forrester had always been the first to sneer when other people’s children got into trouble. He would boast of the rigid discipline within his own home, censuring other more liberal parents and smirking over the unlikelihood of any of his children making the same mistakes.

The discovery that she was pregnant had outraged her father. The fear of his own loss of face in the local business community, should her condition become known, had been enough to make him disown her. The further news that the father of her child was already married to someone else had been the last straw.

She had been four months pregnant when she’d miscarried, although most of her family had assumed that the loss of her baby was not a natural event. She had been hoist with her own petard. In her teens she had been very outspoken about her determination never to marry or have children. Everyone knew that abortions were relatively easily available and everyone had assumed that she had finally chosen that option. No, she could not tell Vito…Vito, who was so exceptionally fond of children, Vito, with whom she had once enjoyed several heated debates on the subject of a woman’s right to choose. Vito would not believe her either and, if he thought for one moment that she had chosen that option, he would despise her even more than he did now.

‘Tim is only eighteen,’ she started afresh, ramming back the bitter pain of her memories. ‘And some of this is my fault. I never discussed…I mean, he knows nothing about what happened between us. He made certain incorrect assumptions but I had no idea how he felt until this happened…’

The silence dragged on. Vito could use silence like a weapon. She had never been able to understand how he achieved that effect but he did. He sat there, supremely at ease, cool, calm and immensely self-assured. He intimidated her. Her slender hands clenched even more tightly round the bag on her lap. ‘Look, I’m not trying to excuse him—’

‘But that is precisely what you are guilty of,’ he countered.

The word ‘guilt’ sent spectral fingers of alarm wandering down her rigid spinal cord. ‘If Tim receives a prison sentence, his whole life will be destroyed. He lost his head, Vito. He’s very sorry for what he’s done.’

His gaze was unwaveringly direct. ‘Then where is he?’

‘He doesn’t know that I’m here.’ She floundered wildly for a second. ‘And I don’t know why you’re even asking me that. It’s unfair. You’ve stirred up the police so much, he’d probably be arrested if he came anywhere near this building!’

‘Agile,’ Vito murmured softly, appreciatively. ‘I had forgotten how agile you could be. But tell me, if either I or any member of my family had been in the path of that car, do you think your charming brother would have stepped on the brakes?’

Bone-white, she flinched. ‘Why do you want to make what he did even worse than it already is? He ran amok with your car. He didn’t try to kill somebody! It was done on impulse while he was under the influence of alcohol. He didn’t know what he was doing until it was too late!’

Vito made a flexible bridge of long brown fingers. ‘Is that alarming assurance intended to soften my heart? Those who break the law should be punished. Cushioning your brother from the consequences of his own behaviour would not be in his best interests.’

‘It was only your blasted car, Vito!’ she slashed back at him furiously. ‘He didn’t plan to crash it. There’s punishment and punishment. Sending a teenager to prison for smashing up a car and a stupid fountain is what I call over-reaction. It will destroy Tim!’

‘It’s most unlikely that he’ll go to prison for a first offence.’

‘But it’s not his first—’ In horror, she caught back what remained of that killing sentence.

Black lashes dropped reflectively low on brilliant dark eyes. ‘My conscience may then rest in peace. Quite deliberately you have sought to mislead me by contending that his behaviour was quite out of character. But if he has broken the law before, he most definitely deserves what he has coming to him. Clearly the first warning was insufficient to curb his violent tendencies.’

A steel band of tension was now throbbing across her brow. She had come here to help Tim. So far, all she had done was fuel the flames of Vito’s outrage. ‘Have you ever met Tim?’

‘Very briefly,’ Vito conceded. ‘I recognised him at my nephew’s party and had a short conversation with him. He bears a marked resemblance to you in both colouring and temperament.’

‘Do you think I have violent tendencies as well?’ she demanded bitterly as she realised that Vito, probably quite unwittingly, had been responsible for connecting her brother with her for the benefit of the rest of his family.

He ignored the gibe. ‘He has your eyes,’ he said very quietly, his sensual mouth hardening. ‘You both possess considerable physical appeal but in his case, as in yours, it is distinctly superficial on closer acquaintance.’

Temper stormed through her and she lifted her head high. ‘You do have to concede one mitigating factor, however…’

He sighed, glancing fleetingly at his watch, boredom somehow screaming from the tiny gesture, making her even more determined to explode him out of his offensive detachment. ‘And what is that?’

Ashley fixed huge emerald-green eyes accusingly on him. ‘Each and every one of us has the capacity to go off the rails if the provocation is great enough. You once did so yourself, but I gather that I’m not supposed to remember that occasion.’

His golden features shuttered, his jawline clenching hard. ‘The reminder is both unnecessary and irrelevant. I don’t suffer from blackouts.’

In that split-second she came dangerously close to losing control. It had cost her dear to remind him of that last meeting. Rape? No, not rape. In bitter anger it had begun, and in savage passion it had ended. Not an act of love or even of desire. A final, humiliating expression of all-male contempt which had destroyed her pride for many, many months afterwards. Mastering her fury now was the hardest thing she had ever done and she only managed the feat by concentrating on her brother.

‘I’d plead with you if I thought it would make any difference,’ she admitted starkly.

‘It wouldn’t abate my anger one jot.’

Ashley thrust up her chin. ‘OK. What about financial restitution?’

Vito dealt her a cold smile. ‘Your family do not have the means. That “stupid fountain” you referred to was a sculpture, a quite irreplacable work of art. The car? A Ferrari F40 with one or two little extras custom-built to my requirements. I paid four hundred thousand pounds for it four years ago and it’s already a collector’s item.’

‘Four h-hundred th-thousand pounds for a car?’ Ashley stammered in disbelief.

‘It was a limited edition put out to celebrate Ferrari’s fortieth anniversary.’

‘It’s obscene…all that money for a car!’ Ashley gasped helplessly. ‘And the money means nothing to you!’

Vito shifted a lithely expressive hand. ‘And everything to you.’

‘Once we loved each other…’ Every charged syllable hurt her throat, decimated her pride.

‘Really?’ Vito prompted. ‘How strange that you should talk of love now when you made no reference to the emotion while we were together.’

Golden eyes dwelt unreadably on her hot cheeks and she evaded that appraisal. ‘Can we stick to Tim?’

‘You were the one who chose to stray into the past,’ he reminded her.

‘Only because I was stupid enough to try and appeal—’

‘To some vein of sentimentality I might possess?’ he guessed with derision. ‘I’m not sentimental about sex.’

The assurance roared like a shockwave through her. She felt not only humiliated, she felt cheated. ‘But you—’

‘You destroyed what I felt for you.’ It was an icy growl.

‘You had a pretty similar effect on me!’ she traded.

A dark, forbidding anger glimmered in his gaze. ‘I actually believed that you would grow out of your ridiculous ideas. I actually honoured you with a proposal of marriage—’

‘Oh, let’s not make the mistake of referring to that offer in terms of honour!’ Ashley flung back at him furiously. ‘You made it painfully apparent that you thought you were doing me one very big favour. And you wanted a good excuse to avoid the gold-plated Plain Jane your parents kept on throwing at your head! That is, until you came to your senses and got your calculator out and snatched at her with both greedy hands!’

Without warning, Vito sprang up and strode forward to face her. His dark features were set like granite. ‘If you ever refer to my late wife like that again, I may well choose to forget that you are a woman and give you the response that you truly deserve!’

‘L-late? As in g-gone?’ As he towered over her, six feet three inches of ferocious threat, she bowed her head, shattered by the news and cursing her impulsive tongue and the venom that could trip off it so easily in his radius. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘No, you’re not,’ Vito grated.

‘All right. I can’t really be sorry because I didn’t know her!’ Ashley slammed back at him with more truth than tact. ‘But I’m sure she was a saint and a wonderful person, quite unlike me…’

‘Most unlike you,’ he breathed tautly in agreement. ‘You have the face of a Botticelli angel, the temperament of a virago and the amorality of a natural whore. On no count do you have the smallest resemblance to Carina.’

Ashley had turned very pale, beads of perspiration dampening her brow. She was devastated by the vicious response she had invited. ‘Dear God,’ she muttered shakily. ‘I must have been out of my mind when I got mixed up with you!’

A tiny pulse was beating in the hollow below one aristocratic cheekbone. ‘We were both temporarily insane.’

Ashley slowly shook her head. Carina was dead. Carina was just a name and a face in a glossy magazine spread to her. It had been the wedding of the year in Italy, the amalgamation of two great fortunes. Vito hadn’t wasted any time. One month after he had walked out on her, he had become engaged, and one month after that he had married. Carina had floated down the aisle, radiant in blinding white. And she had been radiant, ecstatically happy to have won Vito even by default. The bride had very obviously been in love.

However, Vito had married without love, without even the spur of sexual attraction. On their wedding night, Ashley had felt suicidal…the pain had been that bad, that unendurable. Until that day, she had been unable to bring herself to believe that he could actually go through with it.

But Vito had gone through with it. He had cut Ashley out of his life with terrifying immediacy and precision. And no regrets. Remembering still had the power to chill her to the marrow. She, who had once been so strong, had been broken like a toy and cast aside. She had learnt the hard way that she was no cleverer and no less vulnerable than any other woman in love. In the long, anguished months that had followed, she had lived in a kind of twilight world where she had co-existed with a ghost. In the end, she had been forced to confront and accept the most painful truth of all. Vito had never loved her. If he had, he couldn’t have married another woman.

Stilling a reflexive shiver, she stared at his hand-stitched Italian leather shoes. He hates me, she thought weakly, he hates me because once he was foolish enough to ask me to marry him and I had the audacity to say no. Dear lord, how had this appalling confrontation developed? She was supposed to be here for Tim’s benefit, wasn’t she? And so far, she was guiltily aware that she had made a very poor showing.

‘I’m sorry.’ It stuck in her throat but she persisted for her brother’s sake. ‘I shouldn’t have lost my temper.’

‘Nobody ever taught you how to curb it,’ Vito murmured harshly. ‘But I could have.’

You and who else, mister? But the aggressive question remained sensibly unspoken. She felt like a volcano about to erupt. And she knew she couldn’t. Only two people in the world had this effect on her. One was her father, the other was Vito. Rage took her over. Rage and fear. Instinctively she stifled her acknowledgement of that secondary emotion. Survival, to Ashley, meant never ever admitting that anything or anybody frightened her.

She cast him a glance in which desperate defiance and loathing mingled as blatantly as a blow. ‘I’m not into crawling…’

A winged dark brow elevated. ‘I wouldn’t know. I’ve never seen you attempt such a feat.’

‘But you’d like a ringside seat, wouldn’t you?’ She leapt upright, too restive to remain still, too threatened by his proximity to stay so close. The sudden movement dislodged the loose topknot which confined her hair and a curling tangle of Titian red rippled down far below her shoulders in shining disarray. Irritably she thrust the fiery strands back from her slanted cheekbones, accidentally intercepting a lingering stare from Vito as she lifted her head high. ‘I know what you want to hear,’ she said. ‘I know what you’re thinking right now. In fact, I’m pretty sure I know exactly what you’ve been thinking from the moment I walked into this room!’

‘For the sake of peace, I hope not.’ It was a low-pitched growl which made the sensitive skin at the nape of her neck prickle.

His intonation threw her off balance for a second. Intent golden eyes watched her still with the grace of a gazelle in flight, sunlight glittering fire in that amazing curtain of vibrant hair. Her return look was blank.

‘You want to hear that I deeply regret not marrying you,’ she stated with characteristic bluntness.

‘Do I?’ Vito didn’t move a muscle.

She squared her shoulders, hoping that he was bigger than his fragile male ego when the cards were down. ‘I have to be honest so that we can get this hangover from four years ago out of the way.’

‘Oh, please be honest, cara,’ he encouraged lazily.

She swallowed hard. ‘If you must know, I’m still proud of the fact that I refused to become your possession. A life of round-the-clock surveillance and subjugation at your hands would have stifled me. It would never have worked.’

‘It worked in bed. Dio,’ Vito interposed in a sizzling undertone, ‘how it worked…’

Fierce heat pooled in the pit of her stomach. Flustered and embarrassed out of all proportion to the remark, she said nothing.

Vito surveyed her with formidable cool. The chill factor in the air was powerful. ‘It would have been such a sacrifice? To be my wife? To wear silk next to your skin, diamonds at your throat? I valued you far beyond your true worth.’

‘Well, if you have to think like a tradesman in enumerating the material advantages I missed out on, I expect you did,’ Ashley parried between clenched teeth. ‘But you knew from the start how I felt about marriage. You can’t say you weren’t warned. Marriage is a patriarchal institution which benefits men and oppresses women. It conditions my sex into dependence and passivity, lowers their status and deprives them of individuality.’

‘Feminist claptrap. Dio. I’ve never heard so much rubbish!’ Vito raked back at her in a lion’s roar of intimidation.

Her breasts swelled with anger. Jerkily she shrugged. ‘You are, naturally, entitled to your own opinion—as I am entitled to mine. In any case, I’m not here to resurrect a past that we’d both prefer to forget. Why can’t we leave personalities out of this? I didn’t come here to antagonise you. You make me say things I don’t mean to say. You always did,’ she completed accusingly.

‘You apologise with such finesse.’

In a passion of frustrated emotion, she whirled away. It had been a long time since she had voiced the beliefs she had first formed in her early teens. For some inexplicable reason, she didn’t feel the same religious fervour of conviction that she had once had. But that scarcely mattered now. Why should she apologise for saving them both from the long-drawn-out agonies of a disastrous marriage?

After five months, they had been at each other’s throats at least twice a day. Near the end, it had been like living on the edge of a precipice when you had a pronounced fear of heights. Tears stung her eyes. She was the one person who could reason with Vito on Tim’s behalf and yet she was the very worst messenger he could have had.

Time had not lessened Vito’s antipathy. She stole a covert glance at his rock-hard profile, absorbing the innate ruthlessness stamped into every slashing line of his stark bone-structure. No, they could never have parted friends. Vito came from a long line of blue-blooded, immensely wealthy and arrogant people. Negative responses had figured rarely in his experiences. Everything he wanted, he got. Everything he wished, happened. When your name was Cavalieri, the world was your oyster and the pearl at the centre was always yours. That Vito had been prepared to marry her in the very teeth of his family’s opposition had made her flat refusal all the more heinous a crime in his eyes.

‘If you could just bring yourself to withdraw the complaint against Tim,’ she pleaded tightly.

‘Why would I do that?’ Vito fielded drily. ‘If I think like a tradesman, I would obviously be striking a most unequal bargain. Freeing your brother from the punishment he most assuredly deserves would not fill me with any warm feeling of benevolence. His freedom is worth nothing to me. What is it worth to you?’

The casual enquiry struck her as savagely cruel. She trembled. ‘Anything…everything,’ she whispered, thinking of Tim’s smashed future and her mother’s fragile mental stability and the unending guilt which would be hers alone if she could not persuade Vito to change his mind.

‘Is it worth your own freedom?’

Her delicately pointed profile turned to him. ‘I don’t understand.’

Black-lashed golden eyes flamed over her tense figure, skimming across the feminine curves that even the unflattering clothing could not disguise and finally fanning at an outrageously leisurely pace back up to her burning cheeks. Only a hot-blooded Italian could have projected that much sexual menace into a single look. ‘Anything…everything? Intriguing,’ he murmured softly. ‘If you returned to my bed, it is possible that I might be persuaded to withdraw the complaint.’

Her slim hands closed convulsively together, the heated colour draining from her complexion. ‘That’s not funny, Vito.’

‘It wasn’t intended to be.’ He sank down with inherent grace on the edge of his immaculately tidy desk. ‘You come to me on my terms—entirely on my terms,’ he stressed, ‘and your brother goes free.’

‘That’s obscene!’ Ashley gasped.

‘You shared my bed once without love. You could surely share it just as happily with hatred,’ he drawled.

Her hands parted and knotted into balled fists.

‘Your body language is so uniquely expressive,’ Vito remarked. ‘Bring some of that fire into the bedroom and I might even be persuaded to buy your delinquent brother a Ferrari of his own.’

She shuddered with rage, fought the emotion and won only by dint of trapping her tongue painfully between her teeth. How dared he? How dared he send her up like this? For, of course, that was what he was doing. He was settling old scores. He wanted to humiliate her. In the situation she was in, it was inhumanly cruel. But that was Vito. The dark side of Vito. The ruthless, unrelentingly vengeful side of Vito which she had clashed with unforgettably on the day he’d married another woman.

He flung his dark head back and laughed soft and deep in his throat. He was utterly pagan in his unashamed enjoyment of her mortification. ‘Allora, cara. Once you said to me, “If you feel like it, go for it”. I am, as you so succinctly advised, going for it.’

‘But you can’t be serious…you can’t be,’ she stammered.

Glittering dark eyes rested on her with a fierce, wholly physical intensity. ‘It would have to be marriage…’

‘Why the hell would you want to marry me now?’ she blistered back at him, abruptly relocating the power of proper speech.

A satiric smile slanted his expressive mouth. ‘But you know the answer to that question, cara,’ he said smoothly. ‘You told me why four years ago. I want a servant to pick up after me, a devoted slave to massage my ego and a bimbo to show off in designer clothes. And, last but not least, sex…unlimited sex, whenever I want it. Only marriage could supply me with all these essentials.’

Involuntarily her jaw dropped, oxygen escaping her lungs in a shattered sound of disbelief. She had long since forgotten those bitter words. Vito, she registered with a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach, had not.

‘In addition,’ he continued, luxuriant lashes dropping reflectively low as he looked her over again with incredibly offensive thoroughness, ‘beneath that ridiculous miniature terrorist outfit you sport lurks a perfect body and a very beautiful woman. I still want to possess that woman. And why should I not when the means are within my grasp?’

‘You’re crazy!’ she cried. ‘Absolutely stark, staring mad!’

‘Am I?’ Vito surveyed her with a brand of cold, grim satisfaction that made her skin crawl. ‘Are you telling me that I could get you any other way? I want you, Ashley. That is the only card you have to play. Whether or not you choose to play it is entirely up to you.’

‘I’d sooner be dead than married to you!’ Stinging conviction lanced from every biting syllable.

‘Is that your final answer?’

In three enraged steps, Ashley reached the door and swung helplessly round to vent yet another last word. ‘You vengeful bastard!’ she hissed in disgust. ‘I hope you burn in hell for what you’ve said to me today!’

‘And I would warn you that “where two raging fires meet together, they do consume the thing that feeds their fury”.’ Contemptuous amusement glittered in his unyielding gaze as he absorbed her bewilderment. ‘Haven’t you ever read The Taming of the Shrew, Ashley?’

In her desperate haste to depart, she cannoned into the stalwart solidarity of his secretary, who was hovering anxiously outside. ‘How can you work for a chauvinistic, woman-hating swine like that?’ she demanded shrilly on her way past.

CHAPTER THREE

‘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.

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. 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 clich;aae 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-modern 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 nailbiting 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 As 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.

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