butterfly from one person to another.'
'I didn't flit to Carina's arms,' Vito bit out with lancing bitterness. 'I fell into them in a drunken, mindless stupor!'
Ashley stilled. 'I beg your pardon?'
'It's really not important-' 'It is to me!'
Reluctantly he turned back to her. 'I considered her to be a close friend,' he confided. 'And one evening, not very long after I had learnt of your visit to that clinic, I went to her apartment…'
'And?' Ashley prompted fiercely.
'I needed someone to talk to but I was very drunk,' he spelt out with distaste, a dark flush of embarrassment accentuating the hard slant of his cheekbones. 'The next morning I woke up in her bed with no memory whatsoever of how I had got there.'
Deeply pained by the image, Ashley turned her head away.
'That's why I married her. She loved me. I believed that I had taken advantage of that. I felt that I had to marry her,' he admitted tautly. 'I thought that you had someone else, I thought that you had had an abortion-'
'Yes,' she conceded strickenly.
'My father was so ill that my mother urged haste. It was complete madness.' Vito emitted a humourless laugh. 'I had lost you. I really didn't care what I did and in that state I married. Only after the wedding did Carina confess that nothing had happened that night. So you see, cara… I was an absolute fool. Had my wits been about me, I might have suspected that I was too incapable of a night of passion, but my wits weren't about me.'
He hadn't told her the truth about his marriage to Carina because that truth had made him feel stupid. Carina had trapped him in the only way she could, relying on his sense of honour to close the bars on that trap.
His mouth tightened. 'I should be entirely honest with you. That wasn't the only reason I married her. She loved me and I wanted you to know that I could get on with my life without you. Not quite the best reason for marrying anyone… least of all a woman worthy of more than I was ever able to give her-'
'She made her choice.'
Vito grimaced. 'She knew I didn't love her but she had this sunny belief that in the end I would. She put up the photos everywhere. They made me feel guilty… that's why it took me so long to have them put away. It was almost as though she was afraid that I forgot she existed if she wasn't immediately in front of me!'
Ashley winced.
Vito straightened. 'I did try to make her happy, but I failed. I couldn't manufacture love to order. I'm really not very good in relationships…in fact, I'm bloody useless!'
'No, you're not. If she knew that you didn't love her, she must surely have known that there would be problems-'
'Which of us are so practical about attaining our heart's desire?' His lustrous dark eyes clung to her briefly and then he squared his broad shoulders and turned away. 'Four years ago, I was so crazy about you I would have married you the first week we met. That wasn't practical either, was it? And that's why I'm leaving now. I don't want your pity.'
'Why would I pity you?' Ashley demanded in a rush of bitterness. 'You were out for revenge, Vito, and you certainly took it!'
'I never wanted revenge,' Vito contradicted with a harsh laugh. 'I wanted you… I needed you, and within days I knew I was still in love with you!'
Ashley gaped at him, transfixed.
'You wouldn't have given me a second chance if I'd asked for one. You hated me,' he intoned, pale and taut. 'I thought I could make you love me-'
He had said exactly the same thing two days ago in her bedroom, only she had completely misunderstood what he was telling her. He had been telling her that he still loved her, asking if she could ever forgive him for what he had done – and she had made no response. 'I can't bear your silence', he had said.
'But you said you wanted a child!' she cried.
He grimaced. 'I didn't want you to suspect how badly I needed you. And if there was a child, I intended to use that child to keep you. I was betting on a dark horse but I couldn't believe that you would be able to walk away.'
'You were right.'
'One right and countless wrongs,' he countered savagely.
'No,' she countered with a soft catch in her voice.
'Your score is just a little higher. When did you realise that I wasn't lying about having had a miscarriage?' He flung her an impatient look. 'Does that matter now?'
'Yes,' she insisted, thinking she was a heel to keep him in suspense like this, but she had to know.
'After you had that accident in Sri Lanka. I really thought I had lost you. Such shocks tend to clear the head,' he grated. 'I realised that I loved you and that nothing else past or present mattered. My own obstinacy was the biggest barrier between us. I had to let go of my own bitterness. You had never lied to me, so why I had to ask myself-should you be lying now, in the present?'
Ashley was trembling with the force of her emotion. 'You'd better unpack again. I don't want you to go.'
He went rigid, slashed a hand through the air. 'But I can't live with you like this! This afternoon, I saw how you must always have seen me,' he delivered half under his breath, his strong emotion palpable. 'I saw what you must truly think of me. You believe that I am a man like your father.'
As she finally understood what had forced his decision to leave, she could have cried. Vito had seen the childhood source of all her defences and put the wrong interpretation on that new knowledge. 'Never,' she argued with determination, not yet ready to admit to him that she had ever been so foolish. 'My father made me afraid of loving. He made me afraid of marriage. He made me afraid of turning out like my mother. Loving you terrified me four years ago! I just couldn't handle it. But I can handle it now. Don't you see that? I don't hate you, Vito… I love you.'
The torment in his intense gaze as he struggled to believe threatened to tear her apart. He crossed the room, reached out two powerful arms and hauled her up against him hard. She met the hot violence of his drugging mouth with equally fierce demands of her own. She couldn't get enough of him. He couldn't get enough of her. Breathing was a challenge as she sunk her greedy fingers into the springy depths of his hair and trapped him in place.
'Dio, it's been so long,' he groaned, surfacing for air. 'I would give ten years of my life to make love to you now!'
'No such sacrifice required.' Ashley hauled him back into her arms with unashamed tenacity.
In the act of being dragged towards the bed, he stiffened and dug long fingers into her mane of hair to still their progress. 'We can't,' he sighed. 'The baby. I read this book.'
'Wh-what book?' she stammered, suddenly embarrassed by her own lack of inhibition.
He stared down at her, gravely serious. 'If there's a danger of miscarriage… no sex.'
'My consultant told me that there's no grounds for my worries,' Ashley whispered, quivering in a white heat of excitement as he involuntarily responded to her proximity by grinding his hips against her in a movement of such blatant male need that her brain cells all turned simultaneously to sludge.
'Are you sure?'
Single-mindedly, she ran teasing fingers down the line of his straining zip. As she leant against him, her hand lingered there in an uninhibited hunger of fascination. It was over a fortnight since he had touched her, and, now that she knew why he had practised such restraint, all inhibitions were cast to the four winds. He was incredibly, wonderfully aroused.
'Dio, I would die if I lost you again,' he bit out raggedly.
'No chance,' she asserted unsteadily. 'Do you really love me?'
'Passionately… madly… forever,' she gasped under the wild onslaught of his hands and mouth. 'Vito… your chauffeur must be waiting in the car!'
He fell back on the bed with her, deaf to all reasoning of the prosaic variety. 'I can't believe that you can forgive me,' he groaned into her hair. 'I screwed up at every turn.'
'I'll take it out of your hide… my way,' Ashley told him. He bit sensuously at the ripe curve of her breast as he slowly dispensed with the scrap of lace depriving him of proper access. 'I'm all yours,' he confided. 'My jealousy blinded me to what I was doing to you in the past. I spent four hellish years wanting you. I nearly worked myself to
