A Vengeful Passion

CHAPTER SEVEN

THAT taunt powered Ashley's revolt. With a superhuman effort she denied herself the drugging heat of his mouth and broke free. Twisting away, hating herself, she rubbed at her reddened lips as though she needed to cleanse herself of his touch. 'But I can fight it,' she swore, as much for her own benefit as his.

'Why fight yourself?' Vito murmured softly. 'You want me. I believe that you want me more than you have ever wanted any other man. That's why you fight me. With me… you feel threatened.'

The calm confident assurance banished the colour from her cheeks. 'And what book of pop psychology did you dig that out of?' she managed shakily. 'Don't think I don't know why you want to think that. From your point of view it's a very flattering interpretation.'

'Is it?' Mercilessly he held her eyes with his own. 'In my life many women have wanted me, cara. To be desired is scarcely a novelty.'

Hatred flashed through her. It was the truth. He had it all. Power, wealth, charismatic attraction and the kind of banked-down smouldering sexuality that magnetised the female sex. It had never surprised her that she had fallen madly in love with Vito. But the force of those feelings had terrified her. Her fragile security had been based on a need for total control of her own life. Instinctively she had known that, given the smallest opportunity, Vito would dominate her, making her choices for her, carving her up and rearranging her into the image he wanted.

'So what picked me out from the common herd?' she prompted with deliberate scorn. A broad shoulder edged up in a graceful shrug. 'Your beauty, your individuality… and the little things-' 'Such as?' Defensively she folded her arms. A faint smile softened the hard line of his mouth. 'The way you challenge me. The way you deliberately take the opposing view to mine in every discussion whether you believe in it or not. And you make me curious. You're like a Chinese puzzle box.'

A box he intended to open. A mystery he intended to solve. He scared her. Yes, she did feel threatened. He was already stripping away those layers he had talked about, denying her any hiding place.

Tilting his dark head back, he studied her with brilliant dark eyes. 'Why, for example, do you always take cover behind a large piece of furniture when we're having an argument?'

'I don't,' she denied and only then realised that she was standing on the far side of the bed, about as far as she could get from him and still be in the same room.

'You do. Once, it outraged me, but now I'm used to it. Physically you're afraid of me and four years ago I found that incredibly insulting,' he confided, slowly closing the distance between them again. 'How can you be afraid of me when I have never once hurt you? Which brings me to the obvious question… who did?' Pale as snow and trembling, Ashley let her lashes drop to conceal the ravaged turmoil suddenly brimming in her eyes. She was incapable of movement as he folded her into his powerful arms, his extreme tension lost on her for she was far too absorbed in her own. 'Because if I ever get my hands on him,' Vito grated in a savage undertone, 'I'll kill him.'

She had not been an abused child. At least she didn't think so. Slaps, shakings, occasional bruises from too forceful hand grips. Her father was a powerfully built man and she had often told herself consolingly that he didn't know his own strength when he lost his temper. But it hadn't been the fleeting physical pain that caused her the most damage… no, it had been the awareness that she was the only one of her family ever to incite that reaction from him. He had never struck her mother, her sister or her brother, was indeed loud in his disgust of other men who used physical force to subdue those weaker than themselves.

No, what had bothered Ashley the most had been the 'why me?' sensation. Why only her and not her siblings? And somewhere along the line she had started to realise that in her father's eyes she was somehow different, presumably different enough not to inspire the love he had for Susan and Tim. For he did love them. He mightn't show it, and Tim might be his favourite, but he did love them in a way he had never loved his younger daughter. Banishing her from the family circle had cost him nothing… she was painfully aware of that fact. '

'Who did it?' Vito demanded. Her lashes fluttered and she came back to life again. 'You're imagining things,' she whispered.

'I thought I might be until I saw your face.' Long fingers cradled the tender curve of her jawbone. Golden eyes alight with fury were pinned with naked obduracy to her vulnerable features. 'Who?' he persisted.

Had she been an innocent, she reflected sadly, she might almost have believed that he really cared. Hot tears pricked her eyelids and she couldn't understand why his response should make her cry. 'It…it was a long time ago,' she muttered. 'Leave it. Some things are private.'

'Not between man and wife.'

'I'm not your wife!' she rebutted fiercely.

His hand tightened on her shoulder, imprisoning her. 'You are my wife, and the sooner you accept that fact, the happier you'll be. And while you're working on that,' he advised, 'accept at the same time that I will never use my superior strength to hurt you.'

A long shudder ran through her. There were worse kinds of pain he could inflict. The sort of pain that left no visible mark. Four years ago he had been remarkably adept at that brand of cruelty. How could she cope with a male so brilliant at penetrating her defences? How could she fight this ridiculous deluding sense that somehow it was a relief?

'Some day you're not going to need to fight me any more,' he told her levelly. 'Some day you will learn to trust me.'

'You're not just ambitious, you're a megalomaniac.'

'I just don't like failure,' he countered darkly. 'And somehow at some stage, without even realising that it had happened, I failed with you.'

The admission sent chill sparks of dread down her taut spine. What more did he want from her? Love? The undying devotion he had sought in the past and been denied? Helplessly she shivered, shrinking from an awareness of how complete would be his revenge if she fulfilled that aspiration. And she was vulnerable. Wasn't it time she faced that truth? He was holding her close and there wasn't a cell in her body failing to fire

to that proximity. Below her breastbone, her heart was pounding like crazy.

'Failure,' he repeated huskily as he drew her unresisting figure down on to the bed. 'A black spot of dishonour on a perfect record. I can't live with it.' With every word he reinforced her deepest fears. Casually he lifted her slender hand. He pressed his his mockingly to the platinum band on her wedding finger. 'Does it feel like a manacle?'

Breathing rapidly, she said, 'A stranglehold. A symbol of possession. I'm surprised you don't want Cavalieri tattooed all over me in case I stray!'

'You won't be straying, cara. I'm very careful with my possessions.'

'Damn you!' she began, trying to sit up.

He ran the tip of his tongue down the valley between her breasts in an erotic foray only halted by a meeting with the towelling edge of her robe. She fell back again momentarily stunned by the rush of heat fired by that most calculating preliminary.

'Dio… I almost forgot.' Reaching behind him, he produced a familiar little box. One-handed, he deftly opened it and extracted a tiny pill. 'Medical science does have its advantages. I thought about them over dinner and I'm prepared to compromise-'

Bewildered, she parted her lips. He dropped it in and automatically she swallowed. 'But you-'

'We don't need it to happen this soon. Success might conclude other pleasures that are for the moment… for me at least,' he conceded raggedly, 'far more important.'

An odd little twinge of pain coloured her relief at his change of heart. He could not have told her more clearly that for him pregnancy would be a sexual turn-off, or possibly the final act of the whole charade he had involved her in.

'Aren't you pleased?' he probed.

'Ecstatic… but you want everything I've got to give in return,' she whispered tightly, understanding that, for this present forbearance on his part, there would be a price.

A questing hand closed over one small firm breast and her eyes slid shut in an involuntary reflex, every tiny muscle tautening beneath her skin in a hot rush of anticipation.

'And that's incredibly generous, isn't it?' he said thickly. 'Considering that I could take it without asking.'

His other hand skimmed down the pale length of her thigh and her senses leapt wildly. Her own hands dug like talons into the embroidered bedspread beneath her, so fierce was the temptation to touch him. She would submit, that was all. Nothing more, nothing less.

Laughing softly, he divided the robe, bent his dark head over her quivering stomach and let his mouth roam over her responsive flesh. 'I'm going to drive you out of your mind,' he promised.

Shedding the twin of her own robe, he rearranged her on the bed as if she were a doll. She collided with the rapacious hunger glittering in the all-male appraisal devouring her pale body, lingering on the swell of her breasts and the sleek curve of her hips. And she burned all over, self-conscious in one sense but strangely proud in another.

She was breathing very fast as she looked up at him, her tormented green gaze wandering from his broad shoulders down to the rough curling hair defining his muscular chest and beyond to his hard flat stomach. About there, she closed her eyes tightly, willing herself into stillness and silence.

He closed his mouth round a rosy nipple and teased her with his teeth. A whimper of stifled sound escaped her. She felt the erotic pull deep in the pit of her stomach like a key turning in a lock. He leant over her, delving his tongue between her soft lips and plundering the response she could not withhold. She was shaking, alternately hot and cold with the force of her own arousal. It had happened so fast, she couldn't control it.

His slim hands moved over her with ruthless precision, now hard, now gentle and always, always one agonising step behind where she needed them to be. She couldn't stay still, she couldn't stay quiet. He was slowly and inexorably working down her quivering length, leaving no part of her untouched. His teeth nipped playfully at a sensitive spot on her thigh and her back arched, the heat building to a cruel pitch as his fingers toyed with the damp auburn curls crowning her most tender flesh. She moaned out loud, choking back his name, panting for breath.

'Let go,' he demanded. 'Or I'll make you let go.' And then he did what she had never allowed him to do before, something so intimate it was unbearable, something so exciting, it drove her right off the edge. Parting her locked thighs, he buried his mouth against that most secret place and tasted her, and after that there was nothing she could do but feel. A primitive avalanche of wild sensation took over and wave upon wave of explosive pleasure shuddered through her in an earth shattering climax of passion that took all else before it.

'You're mine, absolutely, unequivocally mine.'

Not quite sure she was even conscious, she felt her eyes cling to him as he knelt at her feet, surveying her with triumph. Hard hands curved to her hips as he pulled her to him and there wasn't a resistant bone in her body. He drove into her hard and deep until she didn't know where she began and he ended. Her heartbeat slammed into overdrive as he set a savage rhythm. Her skin, slippery with sweat, slid exquisitely against his and she was suddenly, incredibly at fever pitch again, her fingernails raking the smooth damp skin of his back in that instant of raw, electrifying pleasure that freed her from the chains of the mortal world.

Afterwards, it was a long time before he released her from his weight. And she didn't want him to move. She wanted him to stay where he was forever. She felt glorious, and at the back of her woozy mind she knew that sensation wasn't likely to last. He rolled free and lay back for a few brief minutes, silent, in a damp golden sprawl of satiation on the other side of the bed. Incautiously she leant her chin on her elbow and looked at him, only to realise that his attitude of relaxation was highly deceptive. His superb bone structure was starkly apparent beneath his dark skin, grim tension etched into the forbidding line of his mouth. Without warning, he leapt off the bed, snatched up his robe and shrugged into it. She couldn't believe that he was just going to walk out after what they had just shared. Indeed, she let him get as far as the door before she was provoked into speech. 'I'm sorry, sir. Did I disappoint you?'

Lightning-fast, he spun back, the black brilliance of his gaze stabbing into her. 'That isn't amusing.'

Her eyes wide to hold back the scorching moisture welling up, Ashley retorted, 'It wasn't supposed to be. But I shouldn't have to tell a male of your experience that there's a certain form for these occasions-'

'And you would know all about that, wouldn't you?' His nostrils flared with distaste. 'How many other men have there been?'

She went white and regretted challenging him, but pride had demanded that she refuse to allow him to treat her in such a fashion. He had said that she was his wife. A husband didn't make love to his wife and then get up and leave her to sleep elsewhere without a word or even a gesture.

'Tell me,' he invited rawly. 'I want to know.'

'I don't think now would be the most auspicious time,' she said thickly, choking back the humiliated tears clogging up her throat.

'My imagination runs riot,' he intoned harshly. 'I'd prefer the truth.'

'You wouldn't recognise the truth if it bit you.' Tense as a bow string, her eyes huge in her drawn face, she whispered, 'I won't allow you to treat me like this. You said… you said the past was past-'

'How the hell can it be, when every time I touch you it comes alive again?' he slung back at her fiercely between gritted teeth. 'Do you think I want to feel like this? Do you think I enjoy lowering myself to ask such degrading and shameful questions?'

'What do you want? A list of names, places and times?'

Beneath her appraisal he went satisfyingly rigid. 'M-maybe you'd like me to score the names on this list,' she stammered, sick with revulsion.

All the angry colour was wiped from his taut features. 'Tell me, what was that you said about trusting you?' she muttered. 'Even four years ago, you didn't trust me.' She forced herself to look squarely back at him. 'And do you know why? I made this colossal mistake of being what you then called gloriously spontaneous and what I still call gloriously stupid. I went to bed with you the first night we met, and you're so buried in your medieval code of what constitutes a decent woman that you can't ever forgive me for that. It doesn't matter that you were my first lover. The whole time we were together you were just waiting for me to do it again with someone else. And don't think I didn't know that!'

As she fired that final sentence unsteadily at him, she slid off the bed at speed and took refuge in the bathroom, shooting the bolt home on the door.

'Ashley… come out of there.'

Wordlessly she shook her head, tears running down her cheeks. This time he had gone too far. She had allowed him to go too far. But at no price was she prepared to live however briefly with a hypocritical, judgemental swine, who made her feel unclean. 'Do you think I'm proud that I can't keep my hands off you?' he had demanded in London. No, she could quite see, as he swiftly removed himself from her contaminating presence after satisfying his own lust, that he wouldn't be proud.

'Ashley… ' She switched on the shower purely to drown him out.

A long time later she crept out, no precise plan in mind except a fierce, overwhelming need to get away. Hurriedly she dressed, selecting a starkly cut white shift dress and a cerise jacket. After digging a few essential items into a beach-bag, she tiptoed out of the room and downstairs. The house was in darkness. The front doors were not even locked. As she came down the steps from the veranda, a white-clad figure rose from the shadows. 'Lady go out? Lady want car?' It was the middle of the night but his gap-toothed smile seemed to say that the eccentric habits of Europeans abroad were not worth even a show of surprise.

'Yes, car,' she agreed, delighted it was going to be so easy. 'I want to go to Colombo.'

'I get Bandu. Take time.' He looked anxious now. 'Can you take me?' Ashley asked hurriedly, envisaging the whole household being aroused.

'Me? Kumar?' Slapping his chest, he named himself and laughed with positive delight. 'Yes, I take lady. Kumar very good driver,' he asserted.

The fact was not immediately apparent in the way the car lurched round the side of the house but Ashley didn't waste any time in climbing in. Slamming his foot down on the accelerator, he thundered down the highway and they shrieked out on to the road on two precarious wheels.

'Could you drive more slowly?' Ashley gasped. 'Very slow, Kumar go very slow.' They raced down the road at what felt like ninety miles an hour. Kumar was curved round the wheel like a racing driver.

'Slow!' she finally shouted in terror about ten minutes later when she recalled the drop down to the tea terraces on the outer edge of the road. Kumar jumped on to the brakes in an emergency stop. The car skated out of control from one side to the other. The nearside wheel hit the ditch and the car careened into a skid before finally lurching to a halt. Ashley was screaming. Kumar was screaming even louder. The car rocked. Silence fell.

'Go slow, have accident,' Kumar groaned. 'Not go slow in movies, go fast.' Undoing her seatbelt, Ashley staggered out on to the road and threw up in the ditch. She was shaking all over in reaction and was only dimly aware of her companion’s shouted monologue of woe in his own language until a tremendous grinding noise drew her attention. In the moonlight, she stared in disbelief as the car simply rolled off the edge and went crashing down on to the terraces below. Kumar had forgotten to put the handbrake on. The steep incline had done the rest.

He gave a great shriek of horror and threw himself down on the road. He was in such a state that it was some time before she could reassure him that he would not lose his job and that Vito would not blame him for the loss of the car. He was unconvinced, his misery making her feel guiltier than ever. Finally she managed to establish that there was a small rest-house some miles down the road. They started to walk. It took an hour and the heel snapped off one of her sandals when she went over in a pothole. By the time Kumar had roused the owner of the rest house and the portly owner, soon joined by curious wife and excited children had heard the whole story, it was three in the morning and Ashley was wondering how on earth she could have been so crazily impulsive.

She was shown with warm hospitality into a small, sparsely furnished room. After washing at the cold tap over the ancient corner sink, she slid between the patched but scrupulously clean sheets and stared up into the white blur of her mosquito net.

Wasn't she a clever girl, then? But then, when had she ever been clever with Vito? Inexorably her thoughts turned back the years and found no comfort in the past either.

The morning after that fateful party she had persisted with her assertion that she never wanted to see Vito again right up until it came to the point of actually leaving him. Then grudgingly she had allowed him to drive her home. He had asked her out to dinner that evening. She had told him she was busy. He had suggested the following evening and she had told him that she would be busy for the rest of her life.

And he had laughed and said nothing. But that night he had simply arrived complete with an enormous bunch of roses. Her flatmates had been struck dumb. She had reasoned that it wouldn't be cricket to shoot him down in front of an audience, so she had gone to dinner.

'You really don't have to do this,' she had kept on saying, as prickly as a cactus in his company and ordering scrambled egg on toast in the five-star restaurant because she didn't want him to spend his money on her.

'Every day I start with a clean sheet,' she had told him. 'Last night? It never happened. You don't owe me anything.'

'Why are you so determined to drive me away?' he had finally asked.

Clearly it was a very new experience for him with a woman. He had switched on the charm with a smoothness an oil slick would have envied. Last night… it had happened too fast. He was older, wiser, should have known better. It was all his fault, his responsibility, and he wanted them to start over as if it hadn't happened.

'Why?' she had queried baldly.

A wry smile had formed on his beautiful mouth. 'I think I've fallen in love with you.'

'Lust,' she had countered stiffly. 'Fallen in lust.'

'I also think that I'm going to marry you if you ever keep quiet long enough for me to ask you,' he had drawled with complete confidence. That had shaken her, but she had quickly decided that he could not possibly be serious. Even so, she had spent the remainder of the evening explaining in no uncertain terms why she would never marry him or anyone else.

'So we have an affair,' Vito had murmured with immovable calm.

'I don't have time for an affair.' She had been seriously rattled.

An ebony brow had quirked. 'You will find time for me,' he had responded without a single doubt in the world.

And he had been right. But between them they hadn't found quite enough time, she conceded with wry hindsight. No two people could have had less free time available. Banking, at the highest level, was a very demanding career. With barely an hour's warning, Vito could be off to Europe for an unspecified number of days. Ashley had had her classes, her course-work to complete and the necessary hours she put in as a waitress to keep the wolf from the door. And she had also had male and female friends she didn't intend to drop entirely for his benefit.

Although the plan had been that they would start over and get to know each other properly, it hadn't worked out that way. The frustration of their conflicting schedules had meant they scarcely saw each other the first three weeks, and when he took her back to his apartment one lunchtime passion had, quite without prompting, once more flamed out of control. They had never actually discussed living together. He had suggested that she use the apartment when he was abroad to study in peace away from her crowded flat. Piece by piece her possessions had drifted over there, and night after night Vito had contrived to ensure that she didn't go home..

But no sooner had she begun hanging her clothes in one of his wardrobes than the disagreements they had frequently had had escalated into full-scale rows. Now that Vito really knew her schedule, he expected her to drop the commitments that he considered either unnecessary or unimportant. The fact that she insisted on holding on to her waitressing job had outraged him. He had never understood that she could only cope with the vast disparity between their finances by ensuring that she did not live off him like some parasite.

Her equal determination to retain her friends and attend occasional student functions had infuriated him as well. At the outset he had been irritated, but when one evening he chose to join her and discovered her sitting at a table with a male friend, irritation had become outright jealous, possessive suspicion.

When Vito had a relationship with a woman, he expected twenty-four hour exclusive rights. If he wasn't available, he had expected her to sit at home weaving little-woman dreams about him and hanging by the phone waiting for his call. The rows had become increasingly more passionate and destructive. A case of the irresistible force and the immovable object. Neither of them had been prepared to give an inch and Ashley had become more and more insecure, dismayed by how harrowing she found it when Vito was angry with her, trapped by the awful truth that she just didn't have the strength to walk away from him. More and more the bedroom had become the only place where they were ever in complete harmony. When he criticised her, argued with her or even attempted to reason with her, she had started to slam out of the apartment. She'd begun to lie awake nights worrying while he slept like a log. One of her tutors had told her plainly that her work was no longer up to standard. Her concentration was gone. All she'd thought about was Vito… Vito… Vito. He had tried to help her with her work but when one evening she had blamed him for the problems she was having he had lost his temper and told her that she was out of her element in accountancy because she couldn't seem to grasp the intricacies involved.

He had apologised, but she had known that he was telling her the truth, and bitterly had she resented hearing it from someone as effortlessly brilliant in the financial world as he was. It had driven another wedge between them, and then, when they were at daggers drawn, he had disappeared off to Italy one day and taken an entire week to actually phone her.

Elena had visited the day before he returned. And Vito had returned with an ultimatum. He was moving back to Italy. His father was ill. He had family and business obligations that could not be dealt with from London. 'We'll have to get married,' he had said over his shoulder, breaking off to instruct his housekeeper to pack for him.

'It's time you grew up,' he had said.

'I want a family while I'm still young enough to enjoy them,' he had said.

'I am really bored with this feminist sh… rubbish,' he had said.

'You have to accept that my position in the bank and my responsibilities quite naturally take precedence over yours,' he had said..

And when it had finally penetrated-and it had taken a long time-that she was not biting off his hand in her eagerness to grab that generously offered golden ring, he had said, absolutely incredulously, 'But you've been sharing my bed for months!'

A blazing fight had ensued. Ashley had told him a few home truths, the sort of home truths he had never heard before. For someone who loved to dish out criticism, he had been amazingly over-sensitive. In a nutshell, he had gone through the roof. Everything she had ever done to annoy him had been dug up. Everything she had ever failed to do to please him had been resurrected. Even in her anger, she had seen that Vito truly believed that her entire world should revolve round him.

The iron hand had emerged from the velvet glove with a vengeance. For five months Vito had really been babying her along, humouring her, controlling that cuttingly cruel tongue of his, presumably with the greatest of difficulty. For when that glove had come off she discovered that he could demolish her every argument in scathing one-line sentences and make her feel really, really stupid and weak. She had seen her mother, head bowed in submissive silence, and she had seen herself reduced by Vito to a similar level… and that vision had petrified her.

Shifting on the hard mattress, Ashley slid back to the painful present. She got up after eight. Vito would know that she was gone by now. Dully she wondered where she had imagined she could run. Not only did she have a duty to ensure that Kumar didn't suffer for her foolish flight in the middle of the night, she also had the lowering awareness that, even had she made it to Colombo she would have been leaving Sri Lanka with a great bleeding wound where her heart had once been. Her heart didn't just beat a little faster when Vito was around. It jumped up and down and did acrobatics. As her host showed her to a rickety table overlooking the tumbling waterfall at the rear of the property, she was again blinking back the tears she so despised.

Around dawn it had hit her, the truth she had fought so hard to deny. A huge blinding flash of unwelcome enlightenment. There had been so much pain since he came back into her life that she had floundered in bewilderment and a near constant emotional overload. She loved Vito. Only love could give him the power to hurt her this much. Had she ever really hated him? Right now, she didn't know. She was too devastated to think of anything beyond the fact that loving him, the way he felt about her now, was a death sentence.

A faint sound made her head fly up from the menu she was studying. She froze. Vito was standing on the bleached boards of the sagging veranda. He was unnaturally still, his pallor pronounced. One brown hand was fiercely clenched in the cream jacket he had discarded. A white shirt was carelessly open at his throat, his thick black hair damp and tousled, and a most uncharacteristic black shadow of stubble marked his tense jaw line. Slowly he swallowed, incredibly intent dark eyes clinging to her startled face. 'I thought you were dead,' he breathed roughly.