But he hadn't been able to meet that challenge, Ashley completed strickenly. She was appalled by what her mother had revealed.

'I believe that Ashley misunderstands,' Vito murmured. 'You cannot be telling her that she is not her father's child. Tim and Ashley could pa.s.s for twins.'

'The other m-man had sandy hair,' her mother whispered unsteadily. 'We forgot that my grandmother had been auburn-haired. It wasn't until Tim was born six years later that we realised that we'd made a mistake, and by then the damage to Ashley's relationship with her father was already done. He still behaved as though she wasn't his ... I think that every time he looked at her he remembered that other man.'

The silence went on forever. Ashley's father was hunched in a chair, his spread hands covering his face. He looked like a man on whom a sentence of death had been p.r.o.nounced. Ashley was in a complete daze. Unconsciously she focused on Vito for what to do or say next. Her heart had gone out to her mother but a second later she experienced an astonishing pang of pity for her father. Her mother's confession had broken him by depriving him of all dignity. Yet Ashley had learnt much more. Her father must have loved her mother a great deal not to divorce her. But unhappily he had been punishing her ever since.

'Do you still want to leave with us?' Vito asked her mother calmly. Ashley repressed an almost hysterical giggle. Trust Vito to stay in control when the rest of them were all falling apart at the seams in front of him.

There was a long silence.

'I-I think that Hunt and I have a lot to discuss,' Sylvia said hesitantly. She stood up with an air of fledgling confidence and control that shook her daughter. There was a new strength in her mother's stature.

'We'll get lunch at a hotel.' With complete cool, Vito whisked Ashley out to the hall.

Sylvia engulfed her daughter in an emotional embrace. 'I'm so sorry, but I can't leave your father when he's like this.'

'She won't leave him,' Vito a.s.serted as they drove off. 'He's gone to pieces. I think that little scene just cleared the air for them both. The truth needed to come out. It's a shame it didn't happen sooner for your benefit. ' Ashley stole a glance at him. His hard-edged profile was fiercely clenched; the skin pulled tight over his angular cheekbones. She had been wrong to believe that the episode had not affected him, although she could not really understand why he should look so shattered. For he did. Pale and shattered.

'Tell me what it was like growing up with a father like that? With a mother who didn't stand up for you and a brother-in-law who evidently chose to stand on the sidelines as well?'

Her hands were shaking. She couldn't find any of her flippant responses. She was still too disturbed by what had occurred. 'Scary,' she confided jerkily. 'Lonely.' Vito vented a harsh expletive.

'Everybody suffered,' she extended. 'I think Tim got away the lightest because he was a boy and Dad's favourite. Susan married Arnold to escape. There was so much tension...so many arguments. I always fought him. Looking back, it seems so stupid but he picked on me.' And all of a sudden something that she had never ever talked about was finding its own voice and the memories were spilling out of her almost faster than she could frame the words to describe them. The constant criticism and belittling. The sarcasm and the punishments. The fact that her mother had often paid the price for her defiance. The guilt. The shame that her father could find her so unworthy of attention or affection.

'You still haven't told me that he hit you, and he did,' Vito countered darkly. 'I saw it in his face and yours. I wanted to keep on hitting him. It would have given me immense satisfaction.'

'Don't! He didn't really hit me,' she protested. 'Not the way you read about but... but I was always afraid that he would because he got so angry with me.' Uneasily she swallowed, suppressing those memories.

'No wonder you wanted your freedom at university.

You had never had any before.' The flat syllables were curiously clipped.

'No.' She was glad that he understood.

He asked her if she was hungry. Her stomach rebelled at the mere thought of food. Once or twice she tried to initiate conversation but Vito had become disturbingly uncommunicative. But then, he had just met the in-laws from h.e.l.l, she reflected in strong chagrin. Yet she felt curiously at peace. Questions that had troubled her for much of her childhood had been answered. She was not in herself so repulsive that her father couldn't love her. No, she had become the innocent victim of her mother's affair, the focus of all her father's bitterness.

They separated when they got home. Vito said he had some calls to make.

'I'll order a late lunch,' she said.

'I'm not hungry.' The harsh edge to his response made her tense. She wondered what on earth was wrong. His darkly handsome features were shuttered by a fierce constraint beyond her comprehension, but before she could speak he was taking the stairs two at a time.

An hour later she went in search of him. Their chauffeur pa.s.sed by her on the stairs, carrying two cases. With a frown, Ashley walked into Vito's bedroom suite. He was standing at the window like someone in a trance, blistering tension emanating from him in waves.

'I didn't know you had another trip,' she murmured tightly. 'You didn't mention it.' Vito swung round. 'I'm returning to Italy. I can't stay here.'

'You're leaving?' White as a sheet from the sheer shock of his sudden change of heart, Ashley simply stared at him. 'But you said-'

'That I wanted to stay until the baby was born,' he completed. 'But we both know that that isn't what you want.'

She locked her hands together before they could betray her by shaking. Her fingers twisted into each other. 'I don't understand.'

Vito released his breath jerkily, his dark eyes locked to her. 'I think it's past time that I stopped knocking my head up against a brick wall and simply took account of your wishes for a change.'

Only hours ago he had been fighting with her to convince her that he should stay. She just couldn't believe that he now wanted out...without warning ... without discussion ... without anything. 'But I didn't say that I wanted you to leave-'

'You don't need to. I know how you feel about me,' he a.s.serted almost thickly, his strong bone-structure prominent with strain beneath his golden skin. 'To persist in the face of such odds would be utter insanity. I'm not blaming you. Considering what I've done...' He faltered and sucked in air, shifted an expressive hand. 'Well, you've been very tolerant, much more tolerant than I had any right to expect in the circ.u.mstances. But I have to face facts. You would be a lot more comfortable if I weren't here-'

'If you're trying to convince me that you're doing this for my benefit rather than your own, you're not getting anywhere!' Ashley threw at him in a shaken undertone, crossing her arms over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s as if she needed that support.

'Hennessy will be happier if I'm not around and so will I be,' Vito admitted with sudden stark force. 'What has Josh got to do with this?'

'Madre di Dio!' Vito swore rawly, swinging away from her again. 'You're involved with him and I am the intruder, not he, since I forced you into this marriage. Clearly he was on the scene at the time and I could hardly expect you to admit the fact. Now you will be free to continue your liaison-'

Did his conscience require the sop that she had another man waiting for her? Dear G.o.d, she had totally forgotten that Vito had heard Pietro referring to her holding hands and weeping over Josh that day. There had been so much else happening, it had completely slipped her mind. She looked at Vito, rigid, brooding and unbelievably tense, not exactly the last of the liberated husbands in her own opinion. And here he was, giving her carte blanche to ... dear heaven, how dared he?

'I haven't the slightest intention of becoming involved with Josh,' she snapped out. 'Unlike you, I don't flit like a b.u.t.terfly 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 embarra.s.sment 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 pa.s.sion, 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 l.u.s.trous 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 embarra.s.sed by her own lack of inhibition.

He stared down at her, gravely serious. 'If there's a danger of miscarriage ... no s.e.x.'

'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 a.s.serted unsteadily. 'Do you really love me?'

'Pa.s.sionately ... 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 sc.r.a.p 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 h.e.l.lish years wanting you. I nearly worked myself to death trying to forget you. And then you walked into my office that day and suddenly I knew that I would move heaven and earth to get you back. That night, after the opera, I knew that I still loved you. I was devastated by how I felt. I wasn't in control-'

'Neither was I, and that's the way it should be.' She ran loving fingers along the taut line of his mouth. 'You brought us together again. How could I not forgive you for that?' she teased.

'I'll never forgive myself for not being there when you lost the baby,' he admitted gruffly.

Her green eyes shadowed. 'I wanted it so much because you had gone. That was all I had left-' 'Don't-' As he buried his face in the sweet valley between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, she felt the moisture on his cheeks, comprehended his sudden rigidity.

She smoothed his head in forgiveness but her own throat was closing over. 'It happens, Vito. It just wasn't meant to be.' And maybe it would be the same this time too, she conceded painfully, but wishing and worrying weren't likely to change her prospects either way. Perhaps tomorrow she would share those fears. But not tonight. Now was a time to celebrate the sheer joy of being together. But Vito was not so easily diverted. He had to know everything about that first pregnancy. How she had felt, what she had done, how she had managed,' what the miscarriage had been like. Finally she felt the benefit of that sharing. The past slid back to where it should be, less painful than it had ever been.

'I was so shattered when you wouldn't marry me,' he breathed. 'But you were right. Much of it was my ego.'

'I shouldn't have moved out of the apartment so quickly. I was being childish, making a point,' she muttered ruefully. 'I couldn't believe it when you didn't come in search of me. That far, I did trust you even then.'

'I love you so much.' Vito wrapped both arms tightly around her. 'I will never fail you again-'

'You're failing right now.' As he tensed and looked anxiously down into her dancing green eyes, she added softly, running a teasing hand down a long lean thigh, 'I seem to remember something about this guy who gave me fabulous s.e.x ... and here I am offering solid gold I'll-never-Iet-you-go commitment-'

'If you feel like it,' he murmured lazily. 'I do ... I do!'

'I'll take them up for their nap.' Fixing a mock-stern expression to her round face, Priya shooed the two giggling little boys up the slope towards the villa. Marco darted back to treat Ashley to a soggy kiss. He was the quiet twin. Carlo, not to be outdone, came tumbling back, dashed a kiss on her cheek and mumbled, 'No nap, Mummy.' He was the pushy one.

Sent back to rejoin Priya, he dragged his plump little legs and threw her a reproachful glance. For a split second he was Vito to the manner born. Susan laughed. 'He's a real little operator, isn't he?'

'I can't believe they're nearly two years old.' Ashley rested back on her lounger and smiled at her sister, thinking how much closer they had become since the twins' birth.

'Time flies when you're enjoying yourself. I wonder what mine will be like.' Susan patted the slight bulge of her once flat stomach. 'I don't care as long as he's healthy.'

'He will be,' Ashley soothed.

'I never thought I would get up the courage...if it hadn't been for the twins-'

'An utterly trouble-free pregnancy,' Ashley reminded her with a grin.

Susan lifted the book that Ashley had been reading, raising a brow at the t.i.tle. 'Educational Psychology,' she groaned. 'You have to be out of your mind to want to sign on as a student again.'