Virgin On Her Wedding Night

CHAPTER FOUR

WHILE a business report was being summarised for his benefit by a member of his personal team Valente checked his watch, his dark, reflective gaze continually straying to the entrance door to his hotel suite. The growing pressure at his groin increased in concert. Would Caroline dare to put in an appearance?

His wide, sensual mouth hardened into a sardonic line. He had set her a trap and he was keen to see if she would fall into it and drown. After all, if she was willing to respond to so demeaning a sexual summons, it pretty much proved that there was nothing she would not do to get her hands on his wealth. And if there was one field in which Valente Lorenzatto excelled, it was in his ability to spot women so greedy that they would mortgage their souls to the devil for money.

Caroline, however, existed on an altogether more devious plane, and Valente had discovered that fact too late. Five years earlier he’d had complete faith in her. Indeed, her apparent vulnerability and innocence had charmed him, and that awareness still rankled. Right up until that day in the church it had never occurred to Valente that she might be a clever, deceitful fake-the kind of woman who would calculatingly pit one man against another to achieve her own ends. And the exercise had worked very well for her. Bailey, who’d had a womanising reputation, had got jealous and soon afterwards decided to marry her. Valente had learned the truth about Caroline the hard way, and this time around he was determined not to be influenced by crocodile tears or sad tales about her devoted parents.

Caroline got giggly in the hotel lift, and when she closed her eyes the world around her seemed to revolve. She so rarely touched alcohol-and never in quantity-that she was unsure whether she was mildly tipsy or guilty of having seriously overdone it. In addition, instead of discovering a new strain of confidence and sparkling sexiness, she felt nervous, abstracted and dizzy.

The door of the suite was opened not by Valente, as she had expected, but by one of his staff. She walked with care in the high heels she wore. Valente’s veiled dark eyes locked on to her, taking in the unbound tumble of her silvery blonde hair, lingering on the raspberry-tinted pout of her full mouth before skimming down to the swell of her breasts framed by the low neckline and the long silky length of leg revealed by the short skirt.

She took Valente’s breath away: she was all woman, in a way he had never seen her before. Gone was the girlie-girl with the demure look he remembered, and gone was the stressed-out frumpy widow he had met that morning. From her shiny fall of pale hair to her huge misty grey eyes and the perfectly packaged little body below, she looked spectacular. The pressure at his groin became an aggressive throb of arousal. She had virtually nosedived into the trap he had set. He had not bargained on the discovery that he might fall into the same trap with her…for the desire to send her back home was nowhere to be found.

As she settled herself with surprising clumsiness into an armchair across the room, and her dress slid up over her slender thighs to expose more of their perfection than he wanted to share with his companions, Valente quickly dismissed his staff.

‘Valente,’ she whispered as the door closed on their departure. On her inviting lips the syllables of his name ran together with the suggestion of a slur. In his grey striped shirt-he had discarded both jacket and tie-he had a vital male presence that made her heart race. A five o’clock shadow of dark stubble roughened his handsome jawline and his tousled black hair was beginning to form curls. Through the fine cotton shirt she could see more than a hint of the dark whorls of hair outlining his powerful pectoral muscles. Matthew had liked to wax, but Caroline had always liked a man to look like a man, and few met the demands of that role as easily as Valente did. His height, breadth and strength, not to mention his strikingly handsome features, gave him a uniquely masculine quality of raw potent sexiness. Her mouth ran dry.

‘I thought you wouldn’t come,’ he admitted with cruel candour.

Colour lining her cheekbones as she registered that he had been working, because he had really not expected her to meet his challenge, Caroline closed her hands together tightly. ‘Obviously you’re better at blackmail than you realise.’

‘But one always has a choice, cara mia,’ he reminded her lazily, watching her fingers dig into the back of her other hand and knowing she was drawing blood.

‘Perhaps I should have told you to go to hell,’ Caroline slung back, surprise at his attitude awakening her temper as well as a savaging sense of stupidity-because it seemed to her that he had only invited her as an exercise in humiliation.

‘But you didn’t,’ Valente drawled, noting that she was slurring her words again and wondering if it was possible that she could have been drinking heavily. When he had known her she had hardly touched alcohol.

‘It’s not too late! Is this some sort of a game you play? You tell me what you want and once it’s there you don’t want it any more?’ Caroline demanded shakily, because her brain was almost too befuddled to find the right words with which to fight her own corner.

Valente dealt her a wondering appraisal. ‘Haven’t you learned yet that that’s what men are like?’ he breathed. ‘Most of us find that what we can’t have is much more desirable.’

‘I think I should leave.’ Caroline reared upright in one driven movement, and in the same instant her stomach gave a violent lurch of nauseous response that made her skin break out in perspiration.

‘Porca miseria…no!’ Torn between by an attack of rampant indecision alien to him and a fierce desire to sate his sexual hunger without further ado, Valente sprang upright as well. He straightened just in time to see her sway. Her clear complexion had turned the colour of putty. ‘What’s wrong? Are you ill?’

‘Bathroom…’ she muttered urgently from behind the hand she had clamped betrayingly to her mouth.

Moments later Caroline fell awkwardly to her knees on the tiles that floored the pale designer bathroom and was horribly sick-sicker than she had ever been in her life. She was appalled by the exhibition she was making of herself, and in between the retches gasped horror-stricken apologies.

‘Drunkenness is a big turn-off for me,’ Valente declared icily from the doorway. ‘Shout if you need assistance. Otherwise I’ll wait in the drawing room.’

‘Don’t you have any compassion?’ Big fat tears rolled down Caroline’s face as she choked and spluttered in the misery of disgrace.

‘No, and you would do well to remember the fact,’ he fielded without remorse, and the door snapped shut.

She had to hang onto the vanity unit to stay upright while she washed and freshened up as best she could. Although she had been sick, she still felt extremely unsteady on her feet. She took off her shoes and carried them.

Having resolutely banished the image of her suffering from his mind, Valente had returned to work on his laptop. He was in a very bad mood. The son of a father who had been an alcoholic, and abstemious in his own habits, he was disgusted by the state she was in. How dared she show up in that condition? How could she believe that such behaviour was acceptable to him? Did she think that he would want her at any cost, in any state, even drunk? For a male as fastidious as he was with women, it was an offence of no mean order.

She came into the room quietly, but he could still see how much of an effort it was for her just to put one foot in front of the other. His lean, breathtakingly handsome face hard as granite, he surveyed her with derision.

With half of her make-up washed off she was wan, and her smile was long gone. Barefoot, she no longer looked anything like a woman in her mid-twenties. She was so tiny, so delicate in build, with a ridiculously small waist and the fine bones of a bird. He shut off that dangerous train of sympathy-grabbing appreciation and flattened his expressive mouth into a stern line. This was the woman he would have married-the woman who probably would have been the mother of his first child by now.

‘I’m sorry. I was foolish… I don’t drink very often and I just drank far too much before I came out,’ Caroline confided in a sudden desperate rush. ‘I thought it would stop me being so nervous. I thought it would make me stronger-’

‘You’re not a teenager any more. You ought to know better,’ Valente retorted drily. ‘Drunks are never as entertaining as they imagine they are. You can’t even walk in a straight line. It’s not at all attractive.’

At that candid reminder, and still painfully aware of his merciless scrutiny, Caroline folded down on to the sofa beside her. She felt stiff and achy, and her head felt far too heavy for her neck. But more than anything she resented his attitude. After all, over the past forty-eight hours he had single-handedly put her through hell.

She lifted her chin, misty grey eyes bright with condemnation. ‘That’s a shame, when it’s your fault I got drunk in the first place.’

‘How could it be my fault?’ Valente growled, standing over her to stare down at her with judgemental dark eyes.

Caroline forgot her dizziness and leapt up again, clutching at the sofa-arm to steady her swaying legs. It was very much a case of mind over matter. ‘You did this to me by threatening harm to everyone I care about and landing the responsibility for what happens to them on to my shoulders!’

‘And such puny shoulders they are. Who would want to depend on you? I did once, and where did it get me?’ Valente murmured lethally. ‘You can’t blame me for your weakness.’

Caroline was bone-white at having that particular flaw flung back in her face. ‘When did you turn into such a total bastard? You don’t care about anything or anybody as long as you get what you want.’

‘The chances of my getting what I want at this moment look exceedingly remote,’ Valente derided, averting his attention from the voluptuous appeal of her generous mouth and the lush swell of her round breasts. He cursed his powerful libido, and a body which had no conscience and no concept of self-protection, for he was already fiercely aroused. He crossed to the other side of the room to take up a position safely out of temptation’s way. ‘As far as I’m concerned, your state of intoxication makes you untouchable. Other men might be less choosy, but I’m not one of them.’

‘Nothing I’ve done equals what you’ve done,’ Caroline accused, holding herself rigid by the sofa in an effort to reclaim some dignity. It took even greater endeavour to think and vocalise, for her head was light and she felt as if the room was spinning round her again. Scarily, it was beginning to dawn on her that the full effects of the alcohol she had imbibed might not yet have hit her. ‘You hate me. Why won’t you let me explain what happened five years ago?’

‘It’s irrelevant after this length of time.’

‘But I never got the chance to speak to you again because you’d returned to Italy. You even changed your mobile phone number. I wrote to you, though… I poured my heart out on paper. You never replied to my letters,’ she reminded him painfully, thinking of the long weeks she had waited, praying for a reply, and the terrible silence that had underlined the fact that he was gone for ever.

‘I chucked them in the bin unread. There was no point reading them. Some errors of judgement cannot be explained away or forgiven,’ Valente pronounced with disdain, utilising a little white lie to conserve his privacy and to avoid having to deliberate over one very minor inexplicable aspect of his own behaviour.

‘You really do hate me, don’t you?’ she pressed, huge pale silvery eyes focussed on him with disturbing intensity.

‘I wouldn’t waste that much emotion on you, piccola mia. What was done was done five years ago. Now, I think it’s time for me to call my driver so that he can take you safely home,’ Valente delivered.

‘How can I go home when I don’t know what’s going to happen next?’ Caroline exclaimed.

Valente dealt her an incredulous appraisal. ‘If this was a trial view of what you might be like as a wife, you’ve bombed with spectacular effect.’

‘I wouldn’t want to marry you anyway!’ Caroline yelled at him, full volume. ‘I promised myself that I would never get married again because being tied to the wrong person is my definition of hell! Not to mention the fact that you’re sarcastic, cold and callous, manipulative, hypocritical, unscrupulous and sexually deviant!’

‘Sexually deviant?’ Valente launched back at her, only troubling to argue that one phrase of her outraged description of his character.

‘How else would a normal man describe summoning his former fiancée to a hotel like she’s a prostitute?’

‘Define “normal”,’ Valente invited. ‘I’d say I’m still in that class, but possibly a little more adventurous and imaginative than most. If you hadn’t wrecked it, it could have been a very sexy scenario.’

‘For someone with no morals!’ Caroline raged, finally into her stride and ignoring the horribly light-headed swirl she was in, and the fact that her view of Valente appeared to be coming and going and fogging over while her own voice had developed a horrible echo in her ears. ‘I don’t know how to do “very sexy”, or “deviant”, which is why I had to get drunk to come here. But I did it with the right intentions-to help other people.’

Valente was intrigued rather than repulsed by that feisty attack. He was also surprised to discover that the thought of teaching her how to do sexy and deviant in the bedroom had a tremendous appeal that had nothing at all to do with revenge, punishment or good business.

‘To help other people?’ he traded sardonically, unimpressed. ‘Why do you always play the victim? You came here tonight because you were set on saving your own little carcass from the threat of homelessness and poverty, because you would very much enjoy the status and luxury of being my wife, and because, much as you want to deny it with your martyr act, you want a good excuse to get into my bed.’

‘That’s absolutely a lie!’ Caroline snapped shrilly, taking a jerky, uncertain step forward-before crumpling down in a heap on to the carpet like a wind-up doll whose battery had suddenly gone flat.

For an instant Valente thought she was staging a bogus faint, like in the final shot of a melodrama, and he groaned out loud. But something about the stillness of her small shape drew him closer to examine her. He crouched down beside her inanimate body and tried to rouse her again. She had not tripped or struck her head, But when she failed to show any sign of life other than continuing to breathe, grudging concern coloured his cynicism. He rang Reception and asked for a doctor to be called. Offered first aid assistance, he gave a negative answer. If, as he suspected, alcohol was the cause of her collapse, the fewer people who knew about it the better. He picked her up, only to be troubled by how little her slight body weighed, and carried her into the bedroom. He studied her stillness, wondering if he should have called an ambulance instead, or even if he should just be bundling her into his limo to head to the local A &E himself.

The smudged mascara couldn’t hide the purple shadows below her eyes that accentuated her pallor, or the reality that, with the exception of breast and hip, she was exceedingly thin. It was barely five minutes before a doctor arrived at the door; by chance, the older man had been checking in at Reception when Valente had called down and, having overheard the conversation, had offered his services.

Dr Seaborne took one frowning look at his diminutive patient and asked what age she was. Valente was outraged at having to rifle through Caroline’s bag to provide proof of her age on her driving licence before the man was satisfied that he was not some predator with a preference for underage girls. In the midst of that interrogation her mobile phone began ringing. Valente switched it off.

Deeply unimpressed by his inebriated patient, the doctor checked Caroline over as best as he could, and said that he saw no point seeking further medical help simply because she had passed out.

Although severely ruffled by the treatment he had received for the sin of harbouring a very youthful-looking drunk in his hotel suite, Valente knew he could not possibly have her delivered home unconscious without being forced to make the sort of explanation he had no intention of making to her parents. Furious with her for landing him into such an untenable situation, he stripped off her dress and slotted her into the bed-but not before wincing at her unexciting white underwear topped by the sin of tights rather than the tantalising appeal of stockings…

Caroline had to break through layers of discomfort to battle into full wakefulness. Her head ached, her mouth was dry as a bone and her stomach felt distinctly sensitive. Pulling herself up against the pillows with a moan of self-pity, she opened her eyes on a totally unfamiliar room. In a panic, she lurched out of bed, blinking in dismay as her head swam just a little-and she recoiled in horror when the bedroom door opened wider to frame Valente.

‘I heard you get up. I’ll order breakfast for you.’

In the act of trying to wrap herself in the duvet in a hurry, her face hot enough to fry eggs on, Caroline reeled back against the bed for support. ‘No, thanks,’ she said weakly, appalled to acknowledge that she had failed to go home the night before and that she remembered next to nothing about their meeting after being ill.

Exotically, wildly handsome, and extremely well-groomed in his black designer-cut suit and cerise silk shirt, Valente leant back against the doorjamb like a model straight out of a glossy magazine. ‘Eat. It’ll make you feel better, and possibly a couple of painkillers would help too.’

‘Why didn’t you take me home?’ Caroline gasped, looking anywhere but at him. And in the midst of that evasive activity she finally noticed that the pillow beside hers bore the imprint of a head. ‘My goodness…no-we slept together?’

‘The sofa was too small for me.’

Caroline settled aghast grey eyes on him. ‘Did we…? I mean…?’

Valente gave her a slicing look of derision. ‘Do I look so desperate for sex that I would make use of a comatose body?’

As he had no doubt intended, Caroline shrank again, and hugged the duvet all the tighter to her shivering figure. ‘So we didn’t, then. That’s good,’ she managed to say.

‘Quite.’ A slanting ebony brow lifted. ‘But don’t ever drink like that again.’

‘I won’t,’ she said tightly. ‘It was a hideous mistake, and I learn from my mistakes.’

‘Some men would have taken advantage of you in that condition. You were in no state to look after yourself and that’s dangerous,’ he framed harshly.

‘Right…okay…message more than received,’ Caroline countered, squirming with shame. ‘If it’s all right with you I’m going to take a shower.’

Valente waved a helpful hand in the right direction. ‘Breakfast will be waiting when you’re ready.’

After stooping to pick up the silver-blue dress from the floor, Caroline wore the duvet into the bathroom. Only then did she wonder what time it was, and take on board the reality that she had stayed out all night. Her watch let her know it was only eight o’clock, and she knew her parents were unlikely to get home until lunchtime at the earliest since her Uncle Charles was an elderly bachelor and a most gracious host. Thanking her lucky stars for that reality, Caroline shed the concealment of the duvet and stepped into the shower.

What a disaster she had been in the seduction stakes! How could she have been so foolish as to drink so much? If anything she had damaged her own cause irreparably, because now Valente was disgusted with her. So, once more, the virtue she no longer wanted had been conserved. A shiver of regret ran through her at the thought of how unattractive her behaviour must have been. It wasn’t that she particularly wanted to be attractive to Valente, she reasoned doggedly, only that that supposed attraction appeared to be the only bargaining chip she had.

Putting on the previous night’s clothes was not a pleasurable exercise either. She did the best she could with her hair, but the mirror warned her that too much alcohol had given her a pale, puffy face that looked both plain and tired. She reluctantly joined Valente in the dining annexe off the drawing room. He handed her painkillers and a glass of water first, and she took them without comment because she still felt awful. A large selection of food was on offer, and she nibbled modestly at a few items in the vague hope of settling her stomach. While she ate, and he drank copious amounts of black coffee, Valente described the doctor’s concerns of the evening before, and before very long she wanted once again to sink through the floor in shame.

‘Your phone was ringing last night. I switched it off,’ he told her finally.

Caroline hadn’t even checked her phone, and she fished it out of her bag and switched it on again. She frowned when she realised she had missed a whole heap of calls. Cold, clammy anxiety gripped her when she realised that her Uncle Charles and on two occasions her mother had made those calls, in an unsuccessful but clearly urgent attempt to get in touch with her.

‘What is it?’ Valente prompted.

Caroline was already frantically clicking on her uncle’s number.

The older man answered his phone quickly. ‘Caroline? Thank goodness I’ve finally got hold of you,’ he exclaimed, before telling her that her father had suffered what Charles referred to as ‘a funny turn’ the evening before, and had been taken into hospital. Her mother had accompanied her husband, and had already phoned Charles that morning to ask if he thought she ought to call the police because she couldn’t get hold of her daughter.

‘I’ll go straight to the hospital,’ Caroline stated, in a daze of disbelief and horror at what had been happening while she lay asleep.

‘Hospital?’ As she stood up, Valente closed a hand round her arm to still her. ‘What’s going on?’

Her eyes brimming with guilty tears of anxiety, Caroline explained in harried tones while dialling the number of the hospital which her uncle had given her. She wanted to ensure that her mother would receive a message of reassurance as soon as possible.

‘I’ll take you there right now,’ Valente declared, contacting his staff in turn to issue instructions. ‘Why would your mother have wanted to call the police, though? Do you never stay out overnight?’

‘Of course not. I didn’t worry about last night because I assumed they were safe at Charles’s house. I should have known better,’ she lamented, her conscience eating her alive because she had not been available to offer help and support when she was needed. ‘Now they’ll know I didn’t come home, and they’ll be terribly shocked and upset by that. Who am I supposed to say I was with? If I admit it was you, it’ll be like Armageddon.’

‘You’re an adult, not a child, piccola mia. An explanation shouldn’t be necessary. You were married for several years.’ Brilliant dark eyes assailed her and her tummy somersaulted in response. ‘I can hardly believe that you are still allowing your parents to rule you to this extent.’

‘It’s not like that!’ Caroline proclaimed angrily. ‘I rarely go out at night, and they know I don’t have a boyfriend, so of course they would worry when they discovered that I wasn’t at home in the middle of the night. Unlike you, I lead a very quiet life. Why on earth did you switch off my phone?’

‘The doctor I had summoned to attend to you was waiting to speak to me, and you were in no fit state to deal with a phone call.’

His argument was unanswerable.

Caroline hung her head. ‘I feel so cheap, walking out of a hotel dressed in last night’s clothes. Everybody will know I’ve had a one-night stand.’

‘I should be so lucky,’ Valente quipped, soft and low. ‘The minute we got together it was guaranteed to go wrong. There could not be two more different people on this planet than you and I.’

In the grand foyer on the ground floor, Caroline tried to behave like the invisible woman for the benefit of any interested parties who might choose to regard her as a slut for being seen wearing a cocktail dress at breakfast time. Valente, however, closed a hand over hers and urged her into the hotel boutique.

‘I called ahead,’ he breathed as a saleswoman approached them with a smile.

‘Mr Lorenzatto? I believe we have exactly what you’re looking for.’

With a smile, she extended a dressy sapphire-blue raincoat for Caroline to try on.

Caroline was duly inserted into the coat and the sash pulled tight at her waist. ‘Perfect,’ Valente pronounced, flexing a gold credit card before urging her back into the foyer again.

‘I’ll have to pay you for this,’ Caroline muttered uncomfortably, but she was relieved to have the means of concealing a dress that would have looked highly suspicious to her mother.

‘You don’t ever pay,’ Valente riposted. ‘That’s the main advantage of being the mistress of a very rich man.’

‘I didn’t know I was still in the running,’ Caroline said breathlessly, suddenly aware that his staff and security team were all waiting beside the fleet of cars parked at the front of the hotel, and eying her with intense curiosity. She blushed to the roots of her hair.

Valente noted that every man in their radius was unashamedly staring at the little figure by his side. Even when she made no effort to attract masculine attention she oozed femininity, cuteness and sex appeal from every pore. He clenched his even white teeth hard. Just minutes earlier he had been thinking that enough was enough, and he didn’t want to be involved in the complexities of any form of relationship with Caroline. But the thought of leaving her free, if poor, to be scooped up by some other man had zero attraction for him.

He turned smouldering dark golden eyes on her again. ‘But you want to stay in the running, don’t you?’

Her lashes swept up on her bright eyes and she nodded very slowly in agreement, although she couldn’t quite believe what she was doing.

‘So,’ Valente breathed huskily, ‘you believe that you can do better than last night?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Caroline told him blithely, refusing to give way to her usual sense of failure and low expectation.

His own expectations on a stimulating sexual high, Valente smiled wolfishly down at her for the first time since that unforgotten solitary vigil at the church.