Virgin On Her Wedding Night

‘You just didn’t love me enough, Valente,’ Caroline condemned vehemently. ‘When you tell me now that you’ll never feel like that for me again, it’s not really that great a loss, is it? A man who really loved me would have overcome his injured pride and talked to me again-but not you. So much for love! You just deserted me.’

Lean, olive-skinned features hard with anger, Valente spread wide his arms and threw up both hands in a bold physical demonstration of his wrathful rejection of that scenario. ‘I…deserted…you?’

‘I was crushed. I thought I had nothing left to live for-and there was Matthew, being a very sympathetic and staunch friend in my hour of need,’ Caroline recalled, stinging tears filling her eyes as she looked back at that fateful period of her life. ‘Before very long my parents were pointing out how happy they would be if I married Matthew. He proposed. You weren’t there. I gave in to the pressure-a marriage of friends, Matt called it, but even our friendship didn’t last. Yes, I was an idiot, and I let myself fell into a stupid trap, but if I hadn’t been so unhappy I would never have been that silly!’

Her explanation bore not the smallest resemblance to Valente’s assumptions at the time. ‘I thought you had only used me to make Matthew jealous. I also believed that you had realised you loved him more than me.’

With an unsteady hand, Caroline dashed away her tears. ‘Well, maybe if you’d had enough interest you would have found out the truth for yourself.’ Her grey eyes darkened and her soft mouth compressed. ‘But why are we even having this conversation now?’

‘We’re having it because it’s a conversation we should have had a long time ago,’ Valente conceded between gritted white teeth, violently wound up by her accusations and full of rage, but refusing to parade the emotions storming through him.

‘All that doesn’t matter any more. I’m more interested in your ownership of Bomark Logistics,’ Caroline admitted, bringing the dialogue full circle back to what she saw as the most important question. ‘That you chose, three years after we broke up, to pursue a goal of revenge at any cost truly horrifies me. It proves all over again to me that I must be a rotten judge of character.’

‘I’m not like you, bella mia,’ Valente breathed. ‘When someone injures me I don’t turn the other cheek, and I never will.’

A belligerent glint in her usually soft gaze, Caroline drew herself up straight to her full height. She was so tense that her muscles ached in protest at her stance. ‘But to have set up another haulage firm solely to destroy my family’s livelihood is beyond forgiveness.’

‘I wanted you. All along, my only goal was to gain access to you.’

‘But you started this three years ago, when Matthew was still alive and I was his wife!’

Valente veiled his black-lashed unrepentant gaze. He had pinned his colours to the mast and he wasn’t the man to retreat. ‘Whether you were married or otherwise made no difference to me.’

Caroline rested shaken eyes on him and then turned away, wandering over to the windows to stare sightlessly out at the superbly evocative Venetian skyline. He was so aggressive, so destructive, so unashamed of the methods he had employed. In a word? Ruthless. Yet once he had shielded her from that side of his character, persuading her that he was a much more humane and understanding character. This was the man she loved?

‘No cost was too high to pay, was it?’ Caroline accused in a sudden surge of disgust as she totted up the consequences of his behaviour. ‘What do you think the slow decline of Hales and the loss of those contracts did to my father’s health? It broke his heart. It was his father’s firm, and he was horribly ashamed that he couldn’t keep it in business. You didn’t care that you were hurting my family because you still thought I had let you down.’

His jawline took on an even more stubborn angle. He stood there with the macho air of a male urging her to throw whatever she liked at him and see how well he would withstand the barrage. ‘You did let me down.’

‘How did I let you down? By falling ill? By being in hospital the night before our wedding? How was that my fault?’ Caroline launched at him shakily. ‘That was fate. The second thoughts and the doubts and fears that tormented me the next morning while you were at the church were my fault. I admit that, but I still wasn’t well enough to get out of that bed and do anything for myself.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Valente was forced to growl, the reference to hospital having cut through his reserve and ignited his frustration. ‘I told you that I didn’t read your letters.’

‘Any…of them?’ she prompted unsteadily, before turning away, her hand crammed to her wobbly mouth. Further speech seemed pointless. She had poured out her heart in those letters and all to no avail-for he had not even taken the time to read what she had written.

Pulling herself back together again, Caroline focused on Valente with stark denunciation in her eyes. ‘You’re not the man I thought you were even five years ago. You’re more damaged than I could ever have realised. Although you set out to destroy my family, you forgave the family of the man who raped your mother… I don’t understand. Why couldn’t you forgive my parents or me?’

Rigid with self-discipline, Valente bit back the hot words brimming on his lips and watched her turn on her heel and walk to the door. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m going to lie down…I’m scared I’ve got another migraine coming on,’ she admitted grudgingly, rubbing her fingers across the tightness beginning to band round her temples. ‘And then I’m flying back to England as soon as it can be arranged-because you scare me.’

‘How do I scare you?’ Valente demanded angrily, outraged by that indictment.

‘You tell me you’ve been plotting against me and my family for years and you don’t understand why I’m scared of you?’ Her voice broke at the height of that incredulous question. ‘Do you think that’s normal behaviour?’

Caroline lay on their bed in a stupor of distress and shock. How could he have been so cruel as to deliberately destroy her family’s livelihood? All right, her parents were not his parents, but they were at a vulnerable age. Had he no conscience at all? Of course, how many people had shown Valente love? No doubt his mother had loved him, but she had died when he was only a teenager, and only after gifting him the bitter knowledge that he was a child born of rape. Valente had only ever known the rougher, more painful faces of lust and love. He still believed Caroline had let him down deliberately five years earlier. How could any man be so stubborn in holding on to his convictions? Yet now, ironically, she understood him so much better, for his image was now clear in her mind. He had scorned her love in the present because he had no faith in her past claims of love. The love of women like Agnese Brunetti had been for his money, and his lean, powerful body, not for the essential male behind the fine feathers.

And no feathers came more fine, Caroline conceded, studying the opulent grandeur of her surroundings with pained eyes. The child of rape had triumphed in worldly terms, but not before suffering many vicissitudes and rejections. It hurt to appreciate that she only figured as one more rejection in his chequered life, yet she had loved him so much. And whatever he had felt for her had been strong enough, enduring enough, to bring him back to her five years on. In fact, over a long period of time he had put in an enormous amount of effort to ensure that when he did re-enter her life he was in an unbeatable position of power and influence. It would be a bit of a come-down for him if he was ever to realise that all he had really had to do was make himself available, and one or way or another she would have come back to him of her own free will.

Valente leafed impatiently through the contents of his safe in the library. He was in a blind rage, and the feeling of being almost out of control unnerved him. At last he extracted a letter, no longer white and fresh, in a fat, battered envelope. Why had he kept it when he refused to lower himself to the level of reading it? He had dumped all those that came afterwards unread. Well, now he would find out what Caroline had been talking about… doubtless some stupid tangle of lying excuses designed to make him think better of her.

He sat down with a glass of the Villa Barbieri’s finest wine and ripped open the envelope with something less than his usual cool. There were eight pages of Caroline’s handwriting to be assimilated. He flattened the first sheet to read, and the breathless over-the-top opening made him acknowledge for the first time how young Caroline had still been in those days, ‘My dearest, darling, beloved Valente…’ it began.

Something twisted inside him, and he began to read with more appetite than he had had when he first lifted the letter. She claimed to have been rushed into hospital with a burst appendix the night before their wedding. Valente went cold, for he was recalling the small seam of scar tissue on her lower abdomen which he had noticed and intended to ask her about-until the pull of her proximity had driven the seemingly minor matter from his mind. Adrenalin pumping through him, he read on at speed. She had been on the operating table fighting for her life while