A Vengeful Passion

CHAPTER FIVE

ASHLEY was traumatised. She sat in the back of the limo like a zombie. Vito had hit her with the one condemnation against which she felt she had no defence. Indeed, she almost felt as though she deserved his revulsion. How he knew didn't matter. It was simply that he did know. It seemed pointless to explain that she had moved into Steve's flat because she had had nowhere else to go. She had sublet her room shortly before she broke up with Vito in an effort to cut down her expenses.

Steve had let her sleep on the sofa. He had been a good friend, supporting her when she'd most needed support but too young and immature even to begin to understand the complexity of a woman's feelings when she realised that she was pregnant and she didn't want to be. Ashley's first reaction had been sheer terror, and when she had learnt that Vito was getting engaged to Carina she had gone to pieces. She had been petrified of what her father would do if he found out. Steve had made the first appointment for her. He had pointed out that Vito was gone, that she was on her own, and furthermore that she had never wanted children. A termination was the only practical solution, he had said. She didn't have the money to keep a baby. How was she going to live? What sort of a life was she going to give the baby?

She had gone for counselling but it hadn't penetrated. She had felt ill and weak and wretched and desperately alone in spite of Steve's efforts to the contrary. And, when the day scheduled for the termination had arrived, she had gone. But ten minutes through the door her pregnancy had suddenly and for the very first time become painfully real to her. She had started to wonder whether the baby was a boy or a girl and whether it would have red hair or black hair or green eyes or dark eyes, and she had begun, slowly and agonisingly, to come apart at the seams as she finally faced up to the fact that practicality and pregnancy were two very uneasy partners.

When she had finally admitted that she just couldn't go through with it, she had been in such an emotional state that the staff had insisted they let her contact someone to come and collect her. She had given them Susan's telephone number because Steve had had an exam that day. And that was how she had come to tell Susan something that she would never have told her had she been more in control. She had told Susan that, no matter how hard it was, she intended to have her baby and keep it. And she had meant it, every word of it. Indeed it was that announcement which had nearly driven her father to violence. When she had miscarried she had felt as though it was some heavenly punishment, a judgement on her for not wanting her baby from the beginning. Her intelligence told her that was nonsense, but the feeling of immense guilt had somehow survived.

'Vito…' she muttered. 'The subject is closed.'

'Then why did you open it?' Ashley was distraught, wholly at the mercy of emotion and reaction, with no space left for considered thought. His hard profile was unyielding. 'I don't like secrets.

I should have faced you with it the first day.'

'I didn't have an abortion… I miscarried,' she whispered painfully. 'Your one great gift used to be the ability to tell the truth no matter how unwelcome it was! Don't insult my intelligence. '

'I never slept with Steve in my life!' Although something in the back of her mind was telling her to shut up, she just had to defend herself.

'Figuratively speaking, you may well be telling the truth,' Vito conceded with cutting bite. 'You didn't sleep very much in my bed either.'

He was inviolable, immovable, his beliefs set in stone. Yet, deprived of her usual mainstay of anger by the sheer depth of her inner pain, she still persisted. 'I was with Tim today,' she told him again. 'And that bruise happened when I bent over a suitcase this morning and collided with the lock. Furthermore, I haven't got a lover.'

'You have sex with your partners. Love would indeed be a euphemism.'

He actually took her to the opera. She couldn't believe that he could be that cruel but he was. And Ashley, who had always loved the opera, heard nothing but a deafening cacophony of soaring voices coming at her from all sides in their private box. He hadn't listened. He hadn't given her protestations even a fleeting hearing. He didn't believe her, he was never going to believe her and she had no proof to offer in her own defence. The tears coursed soundlessly down her drawn cheeks.

He took her back to the apartment before the intermission. The silence between them was like a great glass wall and she was too drained to try and climb it. She vanished into her bedroom without a word and tore off the finery he had chosen to frame her in before he smashed her down. She had never been so hurt that she physically ached, but she did now as she crawled naked into the bed like a wounded animal seeking sanctuary. She heard the thud of the front door shutting on his departure and then the dam burst again. He had brought it all back, opening up scars that had yet to heal.

'Ashley, please…' She was startled into a scream when a hand brushed aside the tangle of hair concealing the face she had buried in the pillow to muffle her sobs. 'Go a-away!' she sobbed.

The mattress gave under the onslaught of his weight. 'I was callous and sadistic. I was a total bastard. I admit it. I wanted to hurt you-'

'You did,' she gasped. 'Now go away and let me do my grieving in private.'

'In all the time we were together four years ago, I never once saw you cry. And now twice in a week…' His roughened voice broke off. 'You were always so tough-'

'I used to cry in the b-bathroom with the shower running.'

Vito loosed a laugh utterly devoid of humour. 'I wish I'd known.'

'You would have revelled in it,' she mumbled, and sat up, scrunching the sheet defensively round her and concealing her swollen face below the veil of her tousled hair. 'I thought you'd gone…'

'I couldn't leave you like this. I came back.' He slotted a brandy into her hand and she drank it down like a Cossack about to go into battle. The alcohol eased the ache in her throat but she still refused to look at him.

He laced long fingers into her hair and tipped up her face, preventing her retreat. 'We're getting married in ten days' time and then I have a six-week vacation which we will spend in Sri Lanka.' She trembled at the implacability she met in his fierce dark eyes. Other emotions were beginning to surface from beneath the crushing weight of feeling she had given vent to. No wonder he had called her a whore that first day in his office. Only a woman worthy of that name would have behaved as he believed she had four years ago and again today. He had talked about abortion as though she were so without female sensitivity that such a choice would have meant absolutely nothing to her. Hatred surged in a hot, reviving rush through the cracks he had made in her composure. Loathing at his injustice began to crackle in a series of little fires fed by bitter resentment. He had married another woman, yet he reserved the right to stand in judgement over her for almost making a choice that many women would have made in her position. The guilt she had long borne burnt out forever in that moment. The urge to clear her name that had weakened her response to his bitter prejudice earlier vanished entirely. He hadn't even asked if the child was his. Presumably he thought she couldn't possibly know whether it had been or not. So now she had it all. The truth as Vito saw it, and the motivation behind his coercion.

If he had not loved her, he had certainly been physically obsessed by her. Unsuitable as she was, he had stayed with her five months and he had asked her to marry him. The sensation of what he had termed an 'entirely superficial hurt' to his male pride had been a masterful understatement which appearances could no longer sustain. Her refusal to marry him four years ago must have absolutely devastated him, and the belief that she had immediately turned to another man had added an entire chapter to that devastation. The savagery with which he had condemned her had been revealing. Carina clearly hadn't managed to soothe that rawness. Evidently only the most bitter of revenge scenarios was capable of taking away that slur on his manhood.

'Is it possible for us to start again?' The abrasive demand was literally wrenched from him as he stared down at her, a tiny pulse pulling at the taut edge of his wide mouth. 'This is not how I meant it to be.'

'Blood and gore every five minutes? Why don't you just arrange for me to have an accident?' Ashley enquired shakily. 'It would be so much quicker and cleaner.'

The long brown fingers knotted into the fiery strands of her hair. The ferocity of his brilliant gaze stabbed into her like a knife. 'Hate and love are but two sides of the same coin.'

'You'd better watch out, then. This much hate comes uncomfortably close to manic obsession,' she muttered, her breath tripping in her dry throat.

'And you should know why,' Vito traded, his fingers tightening with the raw tension that smouldered from him.

In his grip, she gave a tiny compulsive shudder, suddenly becoming alarmingly aware of the intimacy of their surroundings combined with her nudity and his white-hot sexual temperament. The vibrations in the atmosphere were shooting round her like invisible lightning bolts, making it incredibly hard for her to breathe. 'Because I said no? Because I had the incredible bad taste to find another man?' she threw at him in provocative intent, hoping to douse the dark flames of arousal in his intent stare.

Vito didn't even flinch. True, a momentary gravity tightened his facial muscles, but the idea that she had so swiftly sought consolation was evidently so ingrained that she could not shock him. 'Because I loved you,' he grated, and she was the one most inconveniently shocked by that confession. 'You look surprised, but why should you? Do you really believe that lust rejected would still incite me to such violence?' He ran the fingertips of his other hand up along the line of her extended throat in a caressing gesture that was curiously chilling. 'Love? I believed it couldn't happen to me. I had given up all hope of it ever happening. I was twenty-eight years old and, in many ways, older than my years. And then one night I saw you on a dance floor and I wanted you more than anything I had ever wanted in my life…'

Ashley was trembling, curiously unwilling to accept the truth of what she had once believed. 'Infatuation,' she said fiercely. 'And it burnt out for both of us.'

'But this didn't…' One forceful hand welding to her taut spine, Vito lowered his dark head. His breath fanned her cheek and then he let his teeth nip playfully at the soft fullness of her lower lip, soothing the tiny assault with the teasing tip of his tongue until involuntarily her mouth opened, inviting a deeper invasion.

The hard heat of his body against hers was a powerful enticement. Tiny little quivers of sexual tension were awakening at every pressure-point where his lean muscles were in contact with her softer curves. Ashley began to shake, struggling to deny and to fight the insidious weakness stealing through her limbs. She could stop this, she would stop this, the little voice in her head screamed. He could not force her into intimacy. But a curious weighted stasis was holding her still in his embrace as though she was waiting for a hurricane warning before she could actually act in her own defence.

'No… no, not this!' Her voice was hoarse with the effort it took to break the spell. He clenched both her hands in his and held her back from him before she could take a single evasive movement. His intent gaze smouldered over her. As she glanced down at herself, she saw the revealing thrust of her nipples against the fine percale sheet still draped across her breasts, and her translucent skin burned with the heat of her own betrayal.

A dark flush accentuated the harsh set of his features. 'If you can't live without a man, that man might as well be me,' he grated roughly.

Fury speared through that all-pervasive physical frailty. Between clenched teeth, she spat, 'If rape turns you on, go ahead!'

A glimmer of black humour softened the hard set of his sensual mouth. 'How you do love to dramatise yourself. Why can't you be honest about this at least? You saw me for the first time in four and a half years last week and within minutes you were hot all over, eating me with your eyes.' Outraged, Ashley shrieked, 'That's a filthy lie!'

Vito dealt her a flashing smile of all-male satisfaction. 'Console yourself with the thought that if you hadn't looked at me like that, you wouldn't be here now. You dug your own grave, cara.'

With a superhuman effort Ashley took advantage of his loosened hold and, dragging her hands free, leapt off the bed. Snatching up the dress she had earlier discarded, she fled the room. The rest of the apartment was unhelpfully in darkness and she skidded in the direction of the hall, uncertain of her bearings.

Vito caught her hand and in her determination to escape she tore her fingers free so violently that she fell back against the wall. 'You're out of control!' she gasped strickenly as he trapped her there, one hand squarely planted on either side of her head in the depths of her hair.

'And so are you,' he breathed unsteadily. 'Exactly the way I like you.'

Scarcely able to believe that this was happening to her, Ashley attempted to raise her knee, but a hard thigh pinned the recalcitrant limb in place and simultaneously Vito brought his mouth crashing down on hers.

It was like a naked flame thrown on tinder-dry straw; a complete and uncontrollable conflagration. As his tongue hungrily probed the moist recesses of her mouth, a hoarse moan of pleasure was forced from her. Her taut body went into meltdown; between one moment and the next all rational thought ceased as though he had thrown a switch. She braced her hands on his shoulders and answered that kiss with complete abandon.

Time had no meaning. All that existed was a fierce world of almost unbearable sensation which wiped out everything else. He was lifting her up to his level, burying his face in the ripe swell of her aching breasts until he found a taut nipple to tease with his mouth and feelings, physical feelings that had been held in too tight for too long suddenly exploded in a fiery gush of response. Her fingers dug into the springy depths of his black hair and she wanted to scream with the power of what she was experiencing. Vito choked out a curse as he cannoned off a door and then he found her mouth again, feeding her desire with the overwhelming force of his own. He didn't break that contact for a second as he brought her down heavily on a bed somewhere in the darkness.

He was struggling out of his shirt and the assistance he got was negligible as her hands wandered in a helpless need for reacquaintance over the broad expanse of his chest, fingertips skating through the dark whorls of hair and down to the smoother skin at his lean waist. He felt hot, as if he was burning up, but the same flames were in her and she was lost, irretrievably lost in the scent and the feel and the touch of him.

Abruptly he wrenched back from her and ripped off the remainder of his clothes. He muttered something in Italian and then he groaned, 'How the hell do you do this to me? It wasn't supposed to be like this.'

Cooler air briefly washed her damp skin and for a split-second a shard of reason almost returned, but, before the nebulous thought could form, Vito was back in her arms with a vengeance. She gasped as long fingers slid between her thighs and found the moist centre of her desire, cried out and arched her back beneath the hot onslaught of his mouth on her taut breasts.

'Tell me how you feel,' he demanded between clenched teeth as he moved over her, his hands rough on her thighs, his body a heavy but blessed weight on hers.

'Vito, please… oh, God, please… don't stop.' She was at fever pitch, her entire being concentrated on a razor edge of unbearable need. She could feel him, hot and hard and ready, and she couldn't wait, was terrified he might make her wait, because if he didn't drive her over that edge she thought she might die from frustration.

He took her like an invading army, ruthless in conquest. The sheer power of his first thrust forced a cry of pain from her dry lips but pain became intolerable pleasure within seconds. Her hips writhed beneath his as he drove into her in long shuddering strokes, his skin slippery with perspiration against hers. She moved to the heated rhythm he set, abandoned and driven by the most intense excitement of all, and then suddenly every muscle clenched and she was moaning with the ecstasy of fulfilment, rawly erotic shock waves spreading out from the very centre of her body to drain her momentarily of all thought and all movement. With a groan of raw satisfaction Vito subsided on her, spent and satiated. Instinctively she wrapped her arms round him and almost instantly drifted off to sleep.

When she surfaced, it was like waking up to a living hell. Lights were on, harsh and glaring, and the first things she saw when she opened her eyes were the photographs on the cabinet by the bed. Carina, smiling from a silver frame. And Carina in Vito's arms, punch-drunk with happiness in one of those informal but intimate studies that just might have been taken on a honeymoon. Ashley's stomach twisted and turned over sickly as if she had gone down too fast in a lift. She turned away and met Vito's shuttered dark gaze. Almost fully dressed, he was shrugging a broad shoulder into the jacket of a navy pinstripe suit. He looked heartbreakingly handsome and soul-destroyingly remote. If he was feeling anything, he wasn't showing it, and that ability of his to shut everything out tortured her at a moment when she felt sick with self-hatred and humiliation. Trembling all over, she shut her eyes, struggling fiercely against her mind's determination to replay the last few hours. It would happen soon enough: the self-examination, the questions that had no welcome answers. But not now, the little voice in her head pleaded, not now… in front of him.

'I think I should leave.' There was no emotion whatsoever in the announcement, except that some sixth sense told her that Vito couldn't wait to get away. She pressed her cheek into the pillow. 'Can I leave too?' she whispered, and it sounded as if she was begging, and for the first time in her life she really didn't care.

'It was inevitable that this would happen.' 'You made it happen,' she condemned. 'We made it happen,' he countered harshly. 'I didn't plan it. I intended to wait until after the wedding.'

A near-hysterical laugh escaped her and she bit down so hard on her tongue that it bled. She never had been able to cope with Vito when he froze, and he wasn't about to let her go. Vito's ancestors had been loan sharks since the Middle Ages. Something for nothing was not a concept that had figured largely in his upbringing. Vito would take what he wanted from her regardless of the cost. He would pick her apart as he had done over dinner and then fall like a vulture on the pitiful remnants that remained. He had done it twice already and the poisonous taste of defeat was smashing her into pieces.

'You should run a little account book, stamp each page every time I-'

'Don't!' he raked at her with sudden rawness. 'It wasn't planned!'

'No?' She cast him a fleeting look because she just couldn't bring herself to face a head-on collision. 'Over dinner you smash me up. Then you trail me to the opera. Then you trail me out of the opera. Then you offer me brandy and a little bit of sympathy and then you… and then you… you-'

'Do you think I'm proud of what I did tonight? Do you think I'm proud that I can't keep my hands off you?' The ice had cracked. Tense as a jungle cat about to spring, he flung the demands at her with lancing ferocity.

'Why don't you throw some money on the bed?' Ashley whispered strickenly. 'Isn't that what you do with whores?'

'You are not a whore!'

'You said I was,' she persisted stubbornly.

Vito flung up both hands in a gesture of raging frustration. 'Dio, I was jealous, so jealous that I wouldn't listen to reason. I accept now that you were with Tim today and that that stupid bruise wasn't what I assumed it was, but at the time I believed you'd been with another man!'

'And now that reason has returned I've been upgraded, have I? Well, I've got news for you,' she bit out shakily. 'I feel like a whore. How you feel has got nothing to do with how I feel.'

He swore, long and low in his own language, both hands clenched into fists. He swung round in a graceful arc and surveyed her with sudden piercing intuition. 'You think that if you make me feel bad enough I'll let you go. I won't,' he said succinctly. 'Next week we are getting married and nothing will change that fact.'

'I think the punishment exceeds the crime.'

For an instant he lingered by the door, brilliant dark eyes appraising her incredibly beautiful face. His expressive mouth tightened as though the view disturbed him… 'But whose is the punishment and whose was the crime?' he breathed tautly.

She slumped back on the bed, caught an accidental glimpse of the photographs and abruptly reared up again. Lifting them, she yanked open the cabinet drawer and dropped them inside. Now why had she done that? She didn't want to think about why. Was she jealous? Four years ago she had been so jealous – she had burnt on a rack of her own making, imagining him with her… over and over again.

And now here she was back in Vito's bed once more, involved in a relationship of such tortuous complexity and bitterness that she could hardly cope with her own turmoil. Somehow it was no consolation to know that Vito's incredibly disciplined intellect was very evidently suffering from a little chaos too. He hadn't planned this. No, well, ungenerous as she felt towards him, she really didn't think that he had. Vito didn't like messy situations. Vito didn't like to lose control.

And Ashley didn't like to lose control either. Passion had surged in beneath her shaky defences and had betrayed her as never before. With Vito, it had always been like that, but in the past it had been a weakness made bearable by love. Only she didn't love him any more. She had taught herself not to love him. Month after month, day in, day out, she had reminded herself of his betrayal until bitterness became her strength and hatred her armour. But what had happened to the bitterness and the hatred when she needed them most? Had she been able to withstand that passion and remain cold, she would be free as the wind right now! Vito was far too male to feel any desire to force his attentions on an unwilling woman. She hadn't been unwilling. Her teeth gritted together in self-disgust. She had ached for the heated caress of his hands and the hot invasion of his body. It had been as if every moment, from that first meeting in his office, had been building up into exactly this climax. In the aftermath she felt sick, mortified by her own abandonment. She had wanted him… oh, yes, she had wanted him every bit as much as he appeared to want her, and consequences be damned. And why was that? She hated him, didn't she? She hated him for what he had done in the past and for what he was doing to her now.

But it didn't seem to make any difference once he touched her. She had been upset, she reminded herself frantically, deeply upset. He had caught her at the worst possible moment and somehow… somehow, she reasoned lamely, all those painful emotions had exploded into passion. A passion she had been unable to experience with anyone else. She thought of the dates she had forced herself to accept when she had so desperately wanted to feel something, anything so that she could reassure herself that she was still in the land of the living. In fact just last year she had met one really special man. A doctor, a single parent with a little girl at the nursery. And she had really liked Josh and he had more than liked her, but when it came to crunch-time she had had to stop seeing him, because liking had flatly refused to turn into love or even desire. And then Vito had come along and she was like a woman with a death wish. Tonight-well, tonight she had gone off the deep end. She had thought of nothing, not even consequences. And it had been years since she was on the Pill, that low-dosage Pill that had been insufficient to prevent her pregnancy. Just suppose she was like her mother, who had once joked that she could get pregnant just looking into a pram? No, it wouldn't happen, she couldn't believe it could happen to her a second time, but she didn't intend to take the risk. Tomorrow she would see a doctor and ask for a prescription for a contraceptive Pill. That would frustrate Vito's plans for the future, and it wasn't as if he could ever find out why she was failing to become pregnant. She would be very discreet.

'I just don't think it's fair to spring this on me. I don't want to meet your family. I want nothing to do with them and I don't see why they should want anything to do with me!' Ashley vented her nervous tension in a staccato burst.

'Don't be ridiculous,' Vito parried with grating impatience, since the argument had been batting back and forth all the way through an endless traffic jam. 'Naturally they would like to meet you before the wedding.' Her nails dug into the soft palm of one clenched hand. She didn't want to be served up like a particularly nasty surprise to Elena di Cavalieri, who probably hadn't gone to bed dry-eyed for a single night since her son had shattered her with the bombshell of his marital plans. And she most certainly didn't want another cheque pressed into her supposedly hot and grasping little hand.

'This party was my mother's idea. Why should you be hostile to the fact that she wants to welcome you into the family and introduce you to some of our friends? I can assure you that organising such a large party at such short notice was no easy matter.'

So why was she taking the trouble? Ashley thought of that tiny, stunningly lovely woman, whose apparent fragility concealed a temperament as tough as old boots. She still cringed when she thought of their last meeting. Fifteen minutes of being cut to ribbons by deep sincerity tear-filled eyes and the inexplicable sensation that she was somehow unclean.

'I won't have her upset,' Vito said softly.

Ashley swallowed hard and smoothed the silk of her band-painted evening gown. She was unable to avoid the flashing brilliance of the diamond ring lodged like a manacle on her wedding finger. Vito had passed it across the table over dinner last night. No frills there, she conceded, and dimly wondered what had happened to the romantic male who had once regularly presented her with flowers and little gifts with all the charm of a very Italian lover. And she hadn't wanted them, although she had struggled to appreciate the sentiment behind his need to continually give her things. She had hated the flowers. When her father had been particularly nasty to her mother, he would always bring flowers home the next day. And her silly mother would go into ecstasies, as if some extraordinary effort had been involved in their purchase. For the very first time it occurred to her that her whole relationship with Vito four years ago had been dominated by her inner terror of somehow ending up like her mother. A tiny frown pleated her fine brows. She had never seen that before and yet it was so obvious. Her unhappy childhood had soared like a huge wall between them.

'It's not too late to invite your family to the wedding.' Ashley shuddered. 'No, thanks.' 'Surely your sister-?'

'We're not close.'

'Have you ever let anyone close?' Vito asked with dark emphasis.

He had come closer than anyone, but he hadn't been satisfied with what she was prepared to give. It was all or nothing with Vito. If you didn't surrender everything, he thought he was being short-changed. Once a banker, always a banker. He had wanted all the accounts out on the table, all balanced and shipshape. He had not listened to the truths he desired to hear. He had simply demanded that she mould herself into the woman he wanted. He had ignored her needs. The idea of her wanting any form of independence had been an insult to his masculinity. She had been a free spirit for the first time in her life and he had tried to cage her. And even if she had felt differently, she had been far too young for marriage and children and all the many responsibilities that both would have demanded of her. Yet Vito had thought he was offering her paradise on a plate. At least this time he knew the score, she reflected tautly.

The past week had been a period of agonising tension. Vito had taken her out three times to dinner and once to a nightclub where he didn't even ask her to dance. He had withdrawn behind a cold front as menacing as a polar freeze. Every night he had dropped her back to the apartment and left her there in solitary confinement. He hadn't laid a finger on her, and she couldn't decide whether that was supposed to be her punishment or his own. Was it any comfort to know that he had clearly found that episode of abandoned sex as devastating as she had? Did what she made him feel threaten him? It was an interesting thought.

Every light in the huge house seemed to be shining with blinding brilliance. This would be her home when they were in London, but not for very long, she told herself. She gave their marriage a year at most. When she proved to be unrewardingly infertile, by virtue of the contraception she was secretly taking, Vito would have no reason to continue the farce. And by then surely, he would have had an overdose of revenge?

A tiny figure clad in something floaty and silvery swam up to them. Ashley's nerveless hands were instantly gripped in an evident rush of warm and welcoming affection. 'I can't tell you how much I've been dying to meet you.' Elena di Cavalieri's use of English had been honed to perfection by years at an English boarding-school. Linking a deft arm in hers, Ashley found herself carried off. Startled, she glanced back at Vito. He smiled, possibly the most genuine smile he had given her in the last fortnight, and her mouth ran dry at the sheer magnetism of that smile until she reminded herself that it was for his mother, who was clearly far too clever to show her real feelings in a no-win situation.

'I think we need to talk.' Elena pressed open a door almost furtively and all but dragged her in. Freed, Ashley hovered in what was a most handsome library. Her future mother-in-law offered her a glass of champagne from a silver tray. The ambush had been pre-planned and there was something just a tinge desperate in Elena's very bright smile. 'Won't you sit down?'

Ashley sank down stiff-backed on an armchair, her defensive antennae prickling with wariness. 'We're getting married the day after tomorrow.' The announcement, ludicrously unnecessary in the circumstances, just flew off her unguarded tongue. She reddened fiercely, abstractedly aware that she had sounded like a woman ready to fight off all threats to the contrary.

'And nothing could make me happier,' Elena assured her levelly.

Ashley stared at her in bewilderment.

Elena sighed. 'I do mean that sincerely. I'm so desperately sorry that I interfered in what was none of my business four years ago. I made a dreadful error of judgement for all the wrong reasons and if I hadn't been so stubborn I would have told him what I had done the minute he came back from London. He was so shattered when you turned him down. I'd never seen him like that before but I told myself he'd get over it.'

'He did, but you don't need to feel responsible. I…I had other reasons for not marrying him,' Ashley responded uncertainly.

'Why haven't you told him about my visit?'

'There was no reason to tell him. That's in the past,' Ashley said, wanting to show that she could be equally generous.

'I really do want you to be happy with my son. I just wish that I could turn the clock back for both of you.' Elena looked a little tearful. 'And some day I hope we can become friends.' Her sincerity was unquestionable. Elena clearly believed that she was the woman Vito loved. Ashley had been softened by her honesty and her careful avoidance of any mention of Carina but she was in no position to respond in kind. How would Elena feel when this marriage also came to an unhappy end? Ashley found herself hoping Vito's mother wouldn't start thinking that her past interference had had any bearing on that development.

Vito was standing across the hall in a clump of other men. As she approached, he immediately excused himself. Interpreting her greater relaxation, he murmured, 'I could have told you there was nothing to worry about. My mother's a very gentle woman.'

Men were so stupid sometimes, Ashley thought irritably. Elena was an unashamedly emotional woman and a ruthlessly protective mother, far less fragile than appearances might suggest. Momentarily she surprised herself with the awareness that she would rather have welcomed Elena as a friend. As it was, she wouldn't be around long enough to scratch the surface even as a daughter-in-law.

The next hour· was a blur of names and faces. Vito infuriated her. The reserve she had endured all week was blatantly cast aside. He was showing her off like a trophy. Mine, that firm hand on her shoulder said. Look but don't touch, said his eyes. Self-satisfaction emanated from him in waves. Only one of his three sisters was present. Giulia, proudly pregnant in a beautiful designer gown, greeted her like an old friend.

'I'm so happy for you and Vito,' she said warmly. 'I insisted on being here tonight. I wouldn't have missed it for anything.'

'When did you get married?' Ashley enquired. 'Almost three years ago.' Giulia patted her stomach complacently. 'And this will be our third child.'

'Your third?' Ashley was quite stunned by the announcement.

Giulia laughed. 'I had twins the first time. You have a lot of catching up to do.'

Ashley managed a very forced smile, thinking how easy it was for some women to reproduce and how horrendously difficult for others. Bursting with health and vitality, Giulia actually made the process look simple, she thought painfully.

'Giulia's crazy about kids,' Vito delivered with a grim look, a betraying tautness etching his hard bone structure.

Something snapped inside Ashley. 'Oh, shut up and go to hell!' she flared in a ferocious hiss, and walked off, fiercely keeping her anguish to herself. She was damned if she would ever tell him again. He deserved to be left in ignorance but she did not deserve the snide remarks.

'Ashley!' A man she was brushing past closed a hand over her arm and looked at her with surprise and pleasure. 'What on earth are you doing here?'

She blinked bemusedly as she recognised Josh's familiar, friendly face, and suddenly grinned. 'I could ask you the same question.'

'Oh, I've been on the guest list ever since I delivered Giulia's twins.' His bright blue eyes twinkled. 'She came over to London on a shopping trip and went into labour in Harrods, of all places. Instead of giving birth in the very exclusive clinic in Rome which she had selected, she ended up in a National Health hospital. So what's your excuse? Care to share it while we dance?'

She allowed Josh to fold her into his arms. Vito was so tall that she could see him across the crush. Even at a distance she could feel the dark force of his appraisal. Dear heaven, here she was actually fraternising at close quarters with a member of the forbidden species… a man! She wondered whether she would be shot at dawn and whether she would be allowed a last request.

'I was a late arrival. Have you seen her yet?' 'Seen who?' she asked.

'Vito di Cavalieri's wife-to-be.' 'You're dancing with her,' she sighed.

'You're kidding me!' Josh held her back from him.

Slowly he shook his head and his mobile mouth compressed. 'You're not kidding. How the blazes did you meet him?'

'A long time ago.' She saw his pain and impulsively leant up and pressed a kiss to the corner of his tight mouth. 'I'm sorry it wasn't you, but he's like a migraine that won't go away,' she whispered, belatedly realising that she had drunk just a little too much champagne since her arrival. 'Why can we never love the people we want to love, Josh? Why do we always have to love the wrong ones?'

'Nature made it that way to keep us all on our toes.' Josh skimmed a wayward strand of Titian hair from one perfect cheekbone and withdrew his hand not quite steadily. 'You're so beautiful, I can't think straight around you-'

'Then permit me to do your thinking for you, Mr Hennessy'.' At the sound of Vito's smooth dark drawl, Ashley's head whipped round so sharply that it hurt. 'Put your hands on her just one more time and I'll break every bone in your body!'

As she spun, Vito clamped a hand that bruised round her forearm, his darkly handsome features a mask of rigidly constrained anger. She clashed with glittering golden eyes and paled.