hopelessly in love with the wrong person. Her mother had made the same mistake after all.
Sylvia Forrester didn't have a strong personality, however. Quiet and gentle, her mother would always follow where others led. After thirty-odd years of her husband’s bullying, she was an apologetic, self-effacing woman, far too weak to cross a man who had made a proud god of masculine domination. She had already had one nervous breakdown.
At eighteen, Ashley had been supremely confident of her ability to control her own emotions. She had her entire future mapped out like a battle plan before her. University, a top-flight degree followed by a meteoric rise to prominence in the business world. Instead she had plummeted like a stone in the first year of her course. Why?
For a crazy five-month span she had lost sight of her goals. She had forgotten the lessons ground into her by her own upbringing. And, to make it even worse, she had honestly believed that she knew what she was doing. It was wonderful the excuses you could make to yourself when you wanted something you knew you shouldn't have. And that put her feelings for Vito then into a nutshell.
Something forbidden, something dangerous, something out of control. Once she had prided herself on her self- discipline. There had been no place for a man in her battle-plan. Men took, men demanded, men expected, men complicated things. Maybe when she was at least thirty, she had thought with the naive certainty of youth, maybe when she was comfortably established in her career, she would let a man into one compartment of her busy, fulfilling existence. 'He' would be enthusiastically supportive of her ambition, content to accept that only that one tiny little compartment was his…
Fate had had the last laugh on her. Fate had thrown up Vito, a male as diametrically opposed to her ideal as he could possibly be. Once Vito had believed that he had her where he wanted her, so besotted she couldn't think straight, he had tried to change her into a totally different person. Piece by piece he had eroded her confidence, criticising this, censuring that. Thank God she had woken up.
One day she might have looked in the mirror and seen her mother staring back at her. An unhappy woman, hooked on a man who was poison for her but too drained of strength and self-worth to take the antidote. It would be news to her sister, but in Ashley's opinion there could have been no worse fate than to end up respectably married to Vito di Cavalieri…
'There is no point in waiting any longer.' The receptionist flashed an irritated look. The phase of meaninglessly polite smiles was long past. 'I did warn you that Mr di Cavalieri wouldn't be available. When he's in London, he's exceptionally busy. His appointment book is filled weeks in advance.'
He wasn't available on the phone and he was no more available in the flesh. He had to see her. He simply had to. He knew why she was here and he had to understand. There was nobody more family-orientated than Vito. She had called in sick at the day nursery where she worked as an assistant. On the dot of opening time, she had entered the Cavalieri Bank. Two hours on, she was still on the ground floor of a twenty-storey building. Perhaps it was naive of her, but she was appalled by the growing suspicion that Vito wouldn't even give her five minutes of his time.
Her surroundings reeked of expense and elegance. Cross a brain like a steel trap with the family bank vaults and you got success, the sort of success that even the receptionist wore like a mantle of superiority. Ashley reddened, painfully conscious that four years ago she would have strolled into this impressive building in jeans and a T-shirt and an unconcerned smile. Then, it wouldn't have bothered her that she looked shabby and out of place. In those days she had been secure in herself. But she wasn't now. As the axe of retribution had fallen on every hope, dream and attachment she had ever cherished, her self-confidence had dive-bombed accordingly.
Vito wasn't going to see her. She tasted the concept, retreated from it fearfully. All right, so they hadn't parted friends. In fact, they had parted on the most violent terms of mutual hatred, but somehow she had assumed that Vito would opt for the civilised response.
'Miss Forrester?' It was the receptionist again. 'If you're prepared to wait for another hour, Mr di Cavalieri may be able to see you. It's not definite now,' she warned. 'His senior secretary is trying to squeeze you in before lunch.'
Ironically, that condescension sent fury hurtling through Ashley. 'How very kind of her,' she said sharply. 'You can wait on the top floor,' she was told frigidly. The top floor was sumptuous. Involuntarily she was impressed, and that annoyed her again. The svelte brunette on the desk looked her over covertly. The loose khaki jacket and cotton trousers she wore were the closest thing she had to a suit. Her hair was doing its usual stint of falling down, dropping untidy tendrils round a face that already felt horribly hot. In all, she felt a mess.
By the end of another hour, she was a limp rag. All her carefully thought out opening speeches and follow-ups had deserted her. Vito, she was convinced, was deliberately keeping her waiting. Vito had the art of subtle, mind- bending cruelty at his polished fingertips.
'Mr di Cavalieri will see you now.'
Gulping, she scrambled upright, hating him for having reduced her to a bag of nerves, harassed by unwelcome memories. A middle-aged woman greeted her at the foot of the corridor. 'I'm afraid Mr di Cavalieri can only give you ten minutes.'
Ten minutes to plead Tim's case to a male who not only loathed her but also equated dropping a sweetie paper on the pavement with crime? She hung on to a hysterical howl of laughter. Ten minutes was better than nothing and, knowing Vito's capacity for holding on to a grudge, nothing was what she had almost received.
Double doors spread wide into an enormous office. An acre of plush carpet stretched before her. She could see a desk with a computer bank and several phones. Psychologically, it was a most intimidating backdrop, reminding her quite unnecessarily that she was entirely on Vito's ground with nothing between her and desperation but the flimsy hope that he did not recall their last meeting quite as accurately as she did…
Her skin dampened. Vito was in view now. Taller than she remembered, darker than she remembered, about a hundred times more staggeringly attractive than she had ever allowed herself to remember. All the sophisticated trappings were there; the superbly elegant suit, the absolutely unshakeable good manners that were prompting that coldly polite smile. But they were only a facade on a fiercely elemental nature and an immense and arrogant ego, a galaxy away from her New-Age-man ideal.
'Thanks for seeing me.' It wasn't the opening she had planned. Indeed, it sounded demandingly humble to her own ears.
CHAPTER TWO
'I'M SURE you'll understand that I'm not being rude when I ask you to be brief.' Vito indicated the chair placed in readiness about six feet from the desk. If his secretary had stepped forward with a blindfold, Ashley wouldn't have been surprised. 'I'll be as brief as possible.'
A satiric black brow elevated. 'Bearing in mind that I have no desire to hear a plea for clemency on your brother's behalf.'
Crushed before she could even warm up, Ashley was relieved when a phone buzzed and he stretched out an impatient hand. As his attention switched from her, she breathed again. The temptation to study him was overpowering. He was incredibly attractive. Hard cheekbones slashed his strong, dark features, highlighting the proud temperamental flare of his nose and a mouth that was a wide, blatantly sensual arc. But, if you were a woman, it was the eyes you noticed first and remembered longest. Vito had stunningly beautiful eyes, golden as the purest precious metal in sunlight or dark as darkest ebony.
In defiance of her every wish to the contrary, Vito still radiated a dark, savage sexuality boldly at variance with a three-piece suit and a silk tie. Every woman between fifteen and fifty raised her chin and sucked in her stomach when Vito passed. And she was not, she learnt, dragging her disobedient eyes from him, the exception that broke the rule. As she lowered her lashes, her skin heated. A tiny pulse at the base of her throat was racing. She was badly shaken by her adolescent response to all that raw, blatant masculinity. Anger followed predictably in the wake of that lowering awareness. He replaced the phone, uttering a bland apology for the interruption.
'You want me to get down on my knees and beg, don't you?' As the hot, thoughtless words burst from her, shrill with resentment, she could have bitten her tongue out for that loss of control.
Vito lounged back in his swivel chair, insultingly unsurprised by the verbal assault. Far too perceptive eyes of
