Vito's soul. A lesser man might have buckled beneath the revelations he had had to endure. But not Vito. He was ashamed of his nephew's behaviour. He felt it as a personal slight. However, he was not about to set her free in restitution. Not now that she was pregnant, she acknowledged painfully.
'Is it true that my mother gave you money?'
The iron control was under threat now. She sat up, meeting the savage darkness of his challenging gaze and she knew that he very much wanted to hear that Pietro had been talking rubbish. 'She came to see me the day before you asked me to marry you-'
His even white teeth gritted in a flash against his dark skin. 'And she offered you money to get out of my life?'
Ashley bent her head. 'No, she wasn't as crude as that. She put the cheque on the table as she left. I expect she thought you were keeping me and she didn't want me to-' She winced as he said a very rude word in Italian. 'That's all there really is to it.'
'If you don't tell me, I'll get it out of her,' he spelt out icily, but his tone belied the smouldering anger of humiliation in his hard stare. 'I want to know exactly what was said.'
Ashley didn't have the energy for a struggle with the sheer overwhelming force of Vito's will. 'What do you think?' she muttered dully. 'That I wouldn't be able to fit, that I wouldn't be able to cope, that I'd embarrass you. I didn't have the right background, the right religion, the right anything. In short, I would ruin your life.'
His back was turned to her, the defensive bunching of his muscles visible even through his well-cut jacket. Without warning, he struck the wall with a coiled fist, making her flinch. 'She was wrong,' he whispered, savagely sardonic. 'I didn't need you to ruin my life. Then and now, I was perfectly capable of doing that for myself.'
'She did it with the best of intentions. She didn't know me. She must have been worried about your father-'
'I'll never forgive her,' Vito swore violently. 'I was no helpless teenager in need of her protection!'
'A son is always a son no matter what age he is.' 'You defend her?' He surveyed her with complete incredulity. 'Why?'
Ashley sighed. 'I think she saved us from making a bad mistake.'
Harsh lines indented the curve between his nose and mouth. He was rigid, palpably restraining the rawness of his emotions with the thinnest remaining edge of control. 'What a shame that she couldn't whisk you out of harm's way this time. It seems that she would have done both of us a very big favour.'
Ashley turned white as though he had struck her, and in a way he might as well have done, so complete was that bitter force of his rejection. She bowed her head, closed her eyes, struggling to absorb the immensity of her pain and conceal it from him.
The doctor's arrival was a welcome interruption. He walked into an atmosphere that could have been cut with a knife. Complete rest and calm and no upsets was his practical prescription. Dinner was brought to her on a tray. She napped for a while after she had eaten, having given up waiting for Vito to reappear. '
Much later she opened her sleepy eyes on lamplight. Vito was casting a long shadow by the window. He wore neither tie nor jacket. With his black hair tussled and his jaw line darkly shadowed, he failed his usual standards of perfect grooming. He also had a glass in his hand.
'What time is it?' she muttered.
'Midnight…later.' With an infinitesimal shrug, he sighed. 'I really don't know.' The syllables dragged ever so slightly.
That very faint slur betrayed him. His mother was right all along, she decided. I'm the kiss of death to Vito… I'm driving him to drink.
He cleared his throat. 'I've seen Lorena, Pietro's mother. She knows now what he has done. She intends to return to Italy with him. She is very close to her late husband's family and believes that they will help her to exercise greater control over his son. I am not so optimistic. I suspect that Pietro will remain a problem.'
Ashley surfaced from the bedding with the sensual glide of a mermaid emerging from the waves. She sat up, righting the slipping satin strap of her diaphanous nightdress. 'You've had a busy evening,' she said, combing her fingers slowly through her vibrant mane of hair so that it fell in a silken mass across her pale shoulders. It was so much wasted effort. The male who would have been electrified by such a display a mere fortnight ago still didn't spare her a glance. 'I'm feeling much better,' she added.
'Good.' The tone was strained. He stared moodily down into the crystal glass he held. 'I seem to have this extraordinary talent for destroying what you hold dear. Yet you must accept that I never intended, never planned for it to be that way. I thought I had the right… I thought that you owed me this chance-'
Unbearably taut, she whispered, 'I'm not sure I follow.'
He threw back his head and laughed with savage amusement. Her entire attention was fiercely locked to him, her heartbeat racing even in that moment of stress to the raw, virile power of his male beauty. 'I have never been afflicted by any great degree of humility,' he confided shamelessly. 'You see, I thought that I could make you love me.'
A hoarse sound of distress escaped her. A shudder of reaction forced a passage through her tense body. He confirmed her own suspicions but it had been many weeks since she had dwelt on those suspicions which would have clouded and ruined that final, glorious month in Sri Lanka.
'I actually thought that if I pushed all the right buttons, it would happen. You would wake up one day and, far from wanting to stick a knife between my ribs,' he asserted harshly, 'you would think, I cannot live without this guy. And you would cling like ivy, cleave like Eve to Adam in the Bible-'
'I think I get the picture, Vito.' It took her a full thirty seconds to even make her voice work and it emerged rusty and flat, unable to rise above the tremendous pain she was fighting to hide. No wonder he had decided not to get her pregnant. He had been far more intent on revenge and he had gone to a lot of effort… in fact he had gone to the most unbelievable lengths to push what he had called 'the right buttons'. And had she been honest with him, he might have been spared all that tedious exertion. He had actually got what he wanted far more quickly and easily than he could ever have guessed. She was so desperately hurt, so horribly humiliated that she wanted to die.
He released his breath in a hiss. 'I was incredibly conceited-'
'Yes.' And with just cause, she conceded wretchedly.
She had been a vulnerable target, a willing victim.
'To even think that after all that I had done to you, you could even… even begin to care for me again,' he practically muttered, sounding rather peculiar.
Since she hadn't brought herself to look once at him in the last few minutes, she presumed it was the effect of the alcohol. 'C-crazy,' she managed jerkily half under her breath.
'It was unforgivable.'
Dumbly she nodded agreement.
'Manipulative, calculating,' he breathed raggedly, an edge of something remarkably similar to desperation in his delivery. 'I can't help being like that… '
She knew what he wanted. He wanted her to shout at him and throw in a few adjectives of her own. It would make him feel better. But for the first time in her life with Vito, she had absolutely nothing to say. Her defences were down. She was in too much pain to feel anger. He would just have to live with his conscience.
'I can't bear your silence,' he admitted gruffly. Accidentally, she glanced up and collided with lustrous dark eyes. He looked shattered, as if every sentence he had spoken had taken a physical toll. She had never seen him like that before; vulnerable, unsure. No doubt she would never see him like that again. He had plunged them both into an unholy mess but she had every certainty that by tomorrow Vito would be concentrating his immense energy and brilliant mind on how to approach with tact the problem of the custody of her unborn children. Two for the price of one and he didn't even know it yet, she reflected mirthlessly.
'Perhaps you would prefer to talk tomorrow when we are both feeling calmer.'
She never wanted to talk to him again, but she nodded and went back to studying the sheet she was nervously pleating. There was no way she could sleep after he had gone. Could he take her children away from her? She hadn't signed anything. She wasn't a drug addict or an alcoholic. She couldn't see what possible argument he could put up in a court of law… Some time around dawn, she fell into an uneasy doze.
'You don't feel car-sick?' Vito shot her a concerned glance. Ashley's teeth clenched. That was the third time he had referred to her health. Add that litany to three other stilted remarks ranging from the weather to the beauty of the countryside and you had a far from scintillating dialogue. She had spent yesterday in bed. She had got up for
