'But that's what you meant!' Ashley lashed back at him painfully. 'You think a real woman puts a man before everything else in her life, including herself!'

'All I do know is that in your case,' Vito breathed harshly, 'I was not the man capable of persuading you to make the smallest compromise or sacrifice on my behalf.'

Ashley loosed a high-pitched laugh. 'A small compromise? A small sacrifice?' she echoed. 'Move to Italy, give up my studies and all hope of ever having an independent career, marry you against my most basic instincts and then proceed to produce progeny with rabbit like efficiency! All those months you pretended that you understood how I felt-'

'I was being remarkably patient and tactful,' Vito incised.

'You were being b.l.o.o.d.y devious and dishonest!' Ashley countered.

'I was compromising my own convictions in an attempt to save our relationship,' Vito bit out between clenched teeth. 'There were times I wanted to shake you until your teeth rattled! There were times I wanted to use physical force to make you listen to me! Times I wanted to get inside your head and rearrange the circuitry into some form of normality.'

'I always said the only sort of real woman you could cope with would be a housekeeping robot!' Ashley spat, grabbing up her bag. 'I've had enough of this, and I wouldn't like to tell you exactly what I think of your baby-boom proposition, although I would dearly like to tell you what to do with it!'

'You walk out of that door and your brother goes to prison!'

Ashley froze with her hand reaching out towards the door and slowly swung back. 'You b.a.s.t.a.r.d!' she gasped strickenly, recalled to reality again with a nasty jerk when for a few minutes there it had almost been like old times, when they had fought hammer and tongs, no insult too low to be utilised, no theme too sensitive to employ.

'I am what you made me,' Vito responded very softly, a dark brilliance simmering like the start of a summer storm in the back of his fierce gaze. 'The guy who gave you fabulous s.e.x but no deeply unsatisfied longing for a permanent commitment.'

Ashley s.n.a.t.c.hed up her abandoned coffee-cup and threw it at him with an unrepeatable word. 'How dare you talk to me like that?' she seethed.

The cup smashed harmlessly against the edge of the fireplace but the contents spattered Vito's jacket. It served him right, Ashley thought furiously. Vito had always seemed to have the opinion that it was somehow beneath him to duck when she threw things.

'You know, my father once a.s.sured me that a gentleman never hits a lady,' Vito murmured half under his breath. 'Therefore I should feel quite free to retaliate. After all, there is no individual worthy of the t.i.tle of a lady currently in this room.'

'You lay a finger on-' Ashley broke off as a quiet knock on the door prefaced the entry of the manservant with the offer of a second cup of coffee.

'Thank you,' Vito stated straight-faced. 'But I've had all the coffee I can handle.'

As the door shut, a powerful hand closed round one of Ashley's wrists and yanked her bodily forward, her slender five-foot-two-inch figure suddenly twisting away from his proximity in dismay.

'Let go of me!' she seethed, and when her demand was ignored something snapped inside her. Determined to break that controlling hold, she went wild, arms flailing, legs kicking. Vito lifted her off her feet with frightening strength, shook her once in mid-air, making her feel maddeningly like a rag doll, and brought her down again in a similarly controlled landing.

'If you want to behave like a wild animal,' Vito intoned in even addition, 'I will be more than happy to supply you with a cage.'

Shocked and winded by the merciless speed of his response, she clashed with glittering golden eyes. The collision left her breathless. The final token struggle, she conceded dully, was over. Not surprisingly, she had lost. She had never won many points with Vito. If she was strong-willed and stubborn, Vito was doubly so. With a knife at his throat, Vito would disdain retreat. His temperament was as fiery as her own but his was controlled by the cool of intellect, not by pa.s.sion. And in any confrontation he would always triumph on the ruthless edge of that streak of cruelty that was uniquely his. And now it seemed that he had her precisely where he had always wanted her ... absolutely and irrevocably within his power.

Abruptly her thought-train was broken by the awareness that Vito had not yet freed her from his hold. Forced into rawly intimate acquaintance with every sleek, hard angle of his lean, muscular length, she attempted to edge out of reach. An imprisoning hand splayed across her hipbone, reinforcing the physical contact she was suddenly desperate to avoid.

'Leave me alone!' she demanded wildly.

Ruthless fingers knotted and twisted into the tangled fall of her hair, tipping her head back.

'You're behaving like an-'

'An aroused male?' Vito vented a low-pitched laugh that did something inexcusable to the level of support offered by her knees. 'But I am. Very aroused.'

'V-Vito ... no!' But he had already pressed his mouth hotly to the tiny pulse flickering wildly in the hollow of her throat and she moaned, beginning to tremble like someone caught unexpectedly in a violent storm. Somewhere in the bemused reaches of her brain she was recalling that she had this one weak spot where Vito was concerned. When he touched her ... oh, G.o.d, when he touched her! The tip of his tongue delved provocatively between her mutinously closed lips and withdrew again. A choked whimper broke low in her throat, sudden raw and delicious tension of a different kind jerking her every muscle tight, driving every single rational thought from her swimming head.

Involuntarily her whole body was reaching up and out, reacting to the lure of an antic.i.p.ation that dug painful claws of need into her flesh. Slowly, unbearably slowly, so that her hands clutched pleadingly at his broad shoulders, he brought his mouth down to the now opened invitation of hers.

He kissed the same way he made love: with fire and pa.s.sion and unholy s.e.xual intensity. Her every skin cell came alive in one gigantic whoosh of feeling. Her skin was clammy, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were swelling and her nipples were pinching into aching tightness. Liquidity ran in a river of drowning weakness through her limbs and she would have sagged if he hadn't been holding her upright. For long timeless moments, she was in a hot, swirling darkness where only the primitive demands of her own body held sway. He moved against her, lithely erotic as a jungle cat, letting her feel the thrusting evidence of his masculinity. She gave up on the unequal fight and folded into the heat and hardness of him, abandoning herself to the savage potency of his hunger as he swept her off her feet and carried her out of the room.

'Take the rest of the day off.'

She heard that. She heard him speaking to someone.

That penetrated the haze of pa.s.sion even as she registered that Vito sounded most unlike his usual cool, controlled self. Some physical sense of where she was penetrated as he brought her down on some unyielding horizontal surface, and her eyes flew wide open, trained to his darkly handsome face above hers, taut and flushed and determined with the force of a hunger she too well understood.

'It's like the first time all over again,' Vito swore huskily. 'Except this time you still have too many clothes on.'

After an arrested pause, Ashley stared up at him in horror, delivered from the voracious grip of pa.s.sion by a deluge of powerful emotions. Caressing fingertips were exploring beneath her T-shirt, and, before she could quench it, her body betrayed her all-over again. A long sobbing sigh escaped her as he shaped her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, an expert thumb teasing at the sensitive peak of her engorged flesh.

Attacked simultaneously by the extremities of shock, disbelief and a cringing sense of shame, Ashley froze. She was too devastated to cope with anything beyond her own reactions to what had just happened between them. The impossible ... the unmentionable ... the unforgivable. She wasn't a teenager with overactive hormones any more. How could she let him do this to her? In unwitting anguish, she looked up at him, seeking an answer to the inexplicable.

Vito's hands slowly stilled, virtually unnoticed by her. 'It hasn't changed, has it, cara? We have an insatiable hunger for each other. Something so powerful I didn't even believe it existed until I met you. That wasn't enough for me the last time,' he breathed in an unsteady undertone. 'But this time, it's going to be the icing on the cake.'

'Don't be disgusting!' Ashley made another feeble attempt to dislodge herself from his hold so that she could rearrange her disordered clothing. Little tremors of physical after-shock were still quaking through her, nor was she yet in any fit state to deal with the ramifications of her own failure to maintain control of the situation.

'And what a relief it is to be with a woman who believes she can treat s.e.x as casually as a man, who expects none of the traditional touches of courtship and romance and who would certainly never dream of demanding that I do something as boringly conventional as wait until after the wedding,' Vito continued smoothly.

Something perilously close to naked panic a.s.sailed her in the wake of that most enlightening speech. 'Something wrong?' l.u.s.trous dark eyes were tracking her every change of expression with the efficiency of a scanner tuning in to easily read airwaves.

An awful lot of somethings. So many that she couldn't put them all together at once. Without the smallest preparation she was being confronted with all the false images she had put up for Vito's benefit four years ago, when it had seemed so desperately important that he did not wring an admission of undying love from her. Being loved gave immense power to the loved one. Her father had wielded that power over her mother throughout their marriage. Ashley had been determined that Vito would never receive that weapon from her.

It's chemistry, it's my age, it's infatuation, she had told herself then. I do not love him, I do not need him, I will not look for him when he is not there. That had been her mantra of self-defence. And she had behaved accordingly, refusing verbally to grant him the exclusive commitment he demanded and loudly disclaiming the double standards which made s.e.xual experimentation acceptable for a man but not for a woman.

Certainly she had not behaved that way without some justification. And from the outset Vito had had that exclusive commitment whether he had chosen to believe it or not. But Vito had acted as though he owned her. She had played her role with the nervous defiance of someone being beaten back into an increasingly tight corner by an overpoweringly masculine male, who thought liberation was something to do with occupied territories and absolutely nothing to do with the female s.e.x. Looking at Vito now, so cool and so calm, it was hard to recall the furious violence of their arguments and the ferocious jealousy and possessiveness he had demonstrated when she dared to show him that he did not have the right to dictate her every move.

'Vito ... I...' It occurred to her that all those proud pretences of hers had truly come home to roost with her now. Vito had an utterly mistaken impression of her true character. Vito had always had a most unendearing habit of misinterpreting what she said, especially when she flung things she didn't mean in a temper. And now, not unnaturally, Vito expected her to practise what she had once so loudly preached.

"'If you feel like it, go for it,''' Vito challenged in an accented drawl as smooth as black velvet. 'And you can't say that you don't feel like making love because I already know that you do.'

'I wish you'd stop throwing every s-stupid thing I ever said back at me!' she launched and subsided again as a blunt forefinger skimmed across her midriff and lingered just above her waistband.

'So you admit that some of it was stupid,' Vito probed mercilessly. 'Or is it just that you would admit to anything sooner than share this bed with me right now?'

In despair she turned her head away, wondering dully if sharing his bed now was Vito's callous method of sealing the bargain she had yet to agree to or merely the first in a long line of heartless humiliations, designed to reduce her pride to rubble. Dear G.o.d, if her brother's freedom was to hinge on this, what was she to do? If Vito made that demand now, she felt that she would walk out of this apartment and under the nearest bus, because she would never be able to look either him or herself in the face again.

'I've never been promiscuous,' she mumbled. Vito dealt her pinched profile a grimly amused smile. Had she seen it, rage would have revived her, but she did not see it. Nor did it occur to her that Vito was being astoundingly patient for a male bent on immediately slaking his l.u.s.t.

And, without warning, what she was to do was taken care of in the most unwelcome fashion possible. Forty-eight hours of frantic worry, powered by insufficient sleep and food, abruptly took their toll. Ashley burst into floods of tears, shocking herself as much as she shocked him. Her most pressing need then was for privacy but Vito caught her back before she could reel off the bed.

'Let go!' she sobbed.

'How can I'. He tugged her into his arms.

'I can't take any more!' Blinded by the raining gush of tears, sobs wrenched at her throat. 'I'm ... I'm not a c-call girl or something.'

'No, you have entirely the wrong att.i.tude and far too much cla.s.s,' Vito a.s.sured her instantly, encouraging her to weep all over his shirt-front while he smoothed her tousled hair back from her brow.

'I c-can't cope with you right now and you know it!' In a surge of mortified frustration, she struck weakly at his solidity with a loosely coiled fist. 'I n-never cry! I despise w-women who do this!'

He murmured incomprehensibly soothing things in Italian. She cried even harder because, G.o.d help her, she liked it. The scent of warm male flesh, so achingly familiar, enveloped her and was as strangely rea.s.suring as the rock-steady beat of his heart. She couldn't remember when anyone had last put their arms round her ... it had probably been him. Something akin to despair engulfed her, adding to her bitter burden of defeat.

A cruising forefinger drifted confidently down over one damp cheek. She didn't move. She was comfortable, comforted, and as he deftly eased her on to the sofa at the foot of the bed she burrowed unconsciously closer. Physically and mentally drained by complete exhaustion, she refused to question the incongruity of her behaviour.

'I should apologise.' Vito hesitated. 'Sometimes you bring out something in me that I don't like very much.' 'That makes two of us. You must see how utterly hopeless it is to expect me to-'

Long fingers tipped up her face. A faintly chilling smile slanted his mouth. 'Don't fight me.' Dark eyes held hers by sheer force of will. 'If you fight me, you'll get hurt.'

'Do you always kick people when they're down?' 'You're not down.' He stood up. 'You're just recharging your batteries. I suggest you move into this apartment while I'm away.'

'Away?'

'I'm leaving for Geneva in a couple of hours. I'll be back next week. Maybe I'll take you to the opera. You like the opera,' he reminded her with the att.i.tude of someone presenting a sulky child with a consolation prize.

She gritted her teeth. 'Tim?' 'I will contact the police.'

'They mightn't listen.'

'The entire episode took place on private property. Whether I choose to prosecute or not is my business,' Vito pointed out with inborn arrogance.

A shuddering spasm of relief slivered through her. He had done this to her, she realised fearfully, encouraged her to dash herself to pieces against that absolute obduracy that was his greatest strength. Four years ago, he had ripped her to shreds by the simple act of walking out. A giant black chasm had opened below her feet and she had drowned. But while she had drowned in the emptiness, the loneliness and the savage agony of loss, Vito had been getting married and moving on coolly to put together the kind of brilliant deals which had made his name in the circles of international finance, his eventual reward that of becoming the youngest ever president of the Cavalieri Mercantile Bank. There was a lesson to be learned in that comparison and it terrified her.

Maybe she was paranoid, maybe it was her overactive imagination, but she had the horrible suspicion that each and every one of her experiences today had been exactly ch.o.r.eographed with the precise intention of reducing her to her current level of emotional devastation.

'I'll make you a lousy wife, Vito,' she whispered. '''Rien ne chatouille qui ne peinee".'

Her French wasn't up to the translation. 'Montaigne,' Vito supplied. '''Nothing gives pleasure but that which gives pain".'

'I'm not a m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t,' she said dully.

'Think of it as a business arrangement - an exchange of mutual benefit. If you endeavour not to be a lousy wife, I will endeavour not to be a lousy husband. What happens between us after the wedding will therefore be your responsibility.'

'Oh, neat cop-out, Vito!' Ashley flung him a glance of weary scorn. He was already pressing a b.u.t.ton on the cordless phone, ordering the car to be brought round, impervious, it seemed, to her att.i.tude.

'To all intents and purposes it will be a normal marriage.'

'If we lived in a lunatic asylum, I guess it would be.' He cast her a genuinely amused smile. The immense charm he was capable of sprang out at her for the first time that day. Involuntarily her gaze clung to his, zapped by that almost forgotten power-surge. 'I knew it wouldn't take long for your batteries to pick up again. Oh, yes, before you go,' he drawled. 'One more little thing. Ground rules.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'I believe in highlighting the small print of any contract with an unwary partner,' Vito a.s.serted. 'I expect you to be pleasant to my family. I will also expect you to dress in a manner appropriate to your status. We'll sort that out next week.'

Her teeth gritted, her lips firmly compressed.

Vito stilled. 'And, last but not least, no men,' he added very, very quietly. 'No flirtations, no male friends, platonic or otherwise. If you break that rule, life won't be worth living, I a.s.sure you, cara.'

Her sensitive stomach executed a nervous somersault.

CHAPTER FOUR.

'You actually want me to believe that you're grateful I brought you two guys together again?' Tim uttered a rude word of disbelief but Ashley could see in his eyes that, yes, that was what her kid brother so desperately wanted to believe, because that way he could enjoy his continuing freedom with an almost clear conscience.

Ashley wished that his train would come. They had been over and over the same ground repeatedly in the past five days. Like her, Tim had a suspicious nature. Unlike Susan, he had not been content simply to accept her story at face value. It had also taken considerable persistence to dissuade Tim from his original intent of seeing Vito to express his apologies, his grat.i.tude and whatever else might have tripped off his dangerously unguarded tongue. She had persuaded Tim to compromise with a letter, overruling his conviction that that was the cowardly way out and tactfully hinting that it might be much less embarra.s.sing all round if he met Vito at some time in the future when the dust on the wrecked Ferrari had at least had time to settle.

'Well, it mightn't have been precisely the way I would have chosen to meet him again.' Tim's gaze slewed guiltily away from hers as he reddened. 'But yes, it gave Vito and me a chance to talk.'

'Do you think you could end up marrying him this time?'

'It's a little too soon to say.' Tim shook his head. 'But he must be really hung up on you to let me off...'

Ashley kept right on smiling. This was the right way to handle Tim. He was going home on study leave to swot for his A-levels. She didn't want him worrying about her. Their parents were back from New Zealand and had not a clue that they might have been faced with a far more traumatic homecoming. In fact, just about everything in everybody's garden but her own was coming up roses. Tim kicked at the rucksack at his feet. 'When I get home, I'm going to sell my car and send the money to Vito.'

'You can't do that. Dad will want to know why!' Ashley argued in horror.

Her brother grimaced. 'I can't pay Vito back in full, but I have to do what I can.'

'Won't his insurance payout?'

'That's not the point, is it?' Tim sighed. 'I can't forget what I did to his car. I can't act as if it isn't my responsibility just because you got me off the hook.' 'You're going to tell Dad the truth,' she guessed, dully aware of where the blame would ultimately be laid.

Leaving the station, she got on a bus that would take her to Vito's apartment. Although she had yet to actually move in, she had left her bedsit and had ferried her possessions over there early this morning before she left to spend the day with Tim. If she was clever enough, this marriage might never happen. Step one was move into the apartment rather than provoke another row with Vito. And Step two? By the time she had finished telling him about the unlikelihood of her ever producing a child in a reasonable time-frame, he might well think better of his proposition. She was hardly the ideal candidate. The bottom line of her predicament was simple. How much was Vito powered by a desire for a son and heir, and how much by a desire for revenge? That the acquisition of a son and heir should be that important to him she didn't even question. Her own father had been unashamedly obsessed by his need for a son. On the day that Ashley had been born, another daughter instead of the son he wanted so badly, Hunt Forrester had walked out of the hospital and hadn't reappeared until it was time to take his wife and newborn child home again.

With a weary sigh she employed the key she had found lying on the antique cabinet in the hall and let herself into the apartment. Planning to make an impressive semblance of unpacking, she walked down to the smaller bedroom she had selected for herself and stopped dead on the threshold. Her cases were gone. She pulled open a wardrobe door, to be greeted by the fluttering draperies of unfamiliar garments. Opening the drawers in the chest won her the same disorientating discovery.

'Where the h.e.l.l have you been?' Ashley spun violently in shock. She had believed she was alone in the apartment. Vito was lounging in the doorway like a thunderous black cloud. Every inch of his long, lean physique spoke of electric tension. Ebony-dark eyes glittered rawly over her jean clad figure.

'I thought you were still in Geneva!'

'I've been trying to contact you here at the apartment for five days!' he delivered grimly. 'So I ask you again, where have you been? You only brought your stuff over this morning.'

Ignoring the demand for an explanation, Ashley shrugged. 'And where is my stuff?' she asked instead. 'I dumped it.'

Ashley stared at him for one long stunned moment. 'I beg your pardon?'

'Every shred of clothing you possess,' Vito confirmed. 'I dumped it all.'

Ashley moistened her dry mouth slowly. 'I don't believe you.'

He flung open the wardrobe. 'I went shopping in Geneva. You dress like a bag-lady. You needed a fresh start.'