A small sound roused her from an uneasy doze. She sat up abruptly as a lamp went on. Her stomach heaved in protest, her head swimming. Vito, dark and devastating in a white dinner-jacket, surveyed her from the foot of the bed. A slight frown pleated his ebony brows, a look of spurious concern in his searching gaze. 'Are you ill?' he enquired.

Swallowing hard on her nausea, she stared back at him with loathing. Obviously her system didn't take to jet-lag too smoothly, and not eating much in recent days probably hadn't helped.

'I'll call a doctor.' Vito straightened with decision. With a look of smouldering resentment, heightened by her sense of being absolutely trapped, Ashley snapped, 'I don't need a doctor! I just don't want anything to do with you!'

He absorbed the colour flooding back into her face. 'Dinner in half an hour, then,' he drawled succinctly. 'I'm not getting up,' she muttered, and rubbed her hot brow. 'I'm so warm.'

'You can hardly expect to be anything else with the windows closed, the curtains drawn and the air-conditioning switched off.' Vito responded flatly and strode into the bathroom.

She heard the gush of running water. 'I didn't know there was air-conditioning.'

From the doorway, he tossed her a blessedly cool cloth and she wiped her face with it blissfully. Sliding upright, she smoothed her creased clothing, wishing she had had the sense to undress before she lay down. Vito was surprisingly silent.

'I'll be down soon.' She sighed. 'How long have you been on these?'

Glancing at him, she froze. In one brown hand, Vito displayed three little boxes. Her supply of the Pill. Ashley was so shattered by the sight that her mouth fell inelegantly open. She couldn't believe he had them. They had been right at the very foot of her suitcase inside her toilet bag. 'Where did you get them from?' she demanded shrilly.

'One of the maids must have unpacked for you while you slept,' Vito breathed. 'They were sitting beside the sink.'

'I don't know how they got there,' she said stupidly. 'Perhaps you would like me to ask the maid?' Ashley paled, her fingernails biting into her clenched palms. The silence went on and on and on, brick piling steadily on brick, and Vito wielded that horrible silence with merciless efficiency.

'We have an agreement.' Vito slid the boxes into the pocket of his jacket. 'And you are a cheat.'

'B-because what you're demanding is. . .is-'

'What you agreed to,' Vito incised unyieldingly. 'And I don't intend to be defrauded by technology.' Agreement ... cheat ... defraud. The terminology of the business world and the law courts. Didn't he realise that she was a living, breathing human being ruled by emotion? Or didn't that matter? For him, emotion clearly didn't enter the equation. The week before last in London when he had made love to her ... that, at least, had been full of emotion. Anger, bitterness, revenge, at least he had been feeling something. But now they were down to the bare bones of the cruellest contract and Vito had just shut down her one escape hatch.

'It will only be for a year.' The a.s.surance was delivered harshly as though the sight of her emotional disturbance was unwelcome. 'If you don't conceive in that year, I'll let you go.'

A year. She squashed back an hysterical laugh of disbelief. A year. You couldn't even say he was prepared to waste that much time on her. A year. She wondered wildly if he would ask for his money back at the end of the trial period. She refused to think about what would happen if he was successful.

She came downstairs in an ice-blue Versace gown that glittered under the lights. While she was dressing, she had vaguely wondered where all the noise was coming from. But, as Priya led her outside, the singsong rise and fall of many voices ceased. They were to dine by candlelight on the veranda but not in splendid isolation, she realised, dazedly taking in the flaming coconut torches set up to light a large circular arena in front of the house. Like a stage, the rear was screened by a laced fence of palm leaves.

As Vito pushed in her chair, he murmured, 'This is a complete surprise to me as well. The staff arranged the entertainment in honour of our marriage.'

They were about to enjoy a performance of the Kolam Natima, a folk drama worthy of the theatre, he explained. A narrator made his appearance, two drummers and a piper backing his entrance. One by one the dancers appeared in glorious costumes and enormous masks, playing the parts of G.o.ds, demons and other mythical beings in a celebration of Sinhalese folklore. Ashley was entranced and, although Vito translated, he occasionally fell silent for some reason.

When Priya approached with two tiny gla.s.ses of a liqueur made from arrack, Sri Lanka's favourite alcoholic beverage, Ashley asked, 'But what is Kolam all about? I'm confused.'

Priya gave her a wide smile and chose to intervene on Vito's behalf. Indicating the two most spectacular masked figures, she said, 'This is the King and that is the Queen. She desires to have a baby, no?' Giggling, she stepped back into the shadows.

Stupid, how stupid she was! Reddening to the roots of her hair, she belatedly read the significance of the dancers' erotically symbolic movements. A very traditional drama for a newly married couple, she conceded. She refused to look at Vito. A brown forefinger skimmed her clenched hand where it rested on the table. 'This wasn't my idea,' he reminded her. In rejection she snaked her hand back out of reach, keeping her attention glued to the dancers below although in truth she could no longer see them.

'You're making this a fight every step of the way.' 'What did you expect?' she muttered bitterly. 'This is not the place for an argument.'

When the performance was over, Ashley smiled until her jaw ached. Vito requested coffee in the drawing room. The evening was becoming an endurance test. 'Is giving a little so impossible for you?' He slung the demand with savage impatience as soon as they were alone.

'Yes.' She bent her head. Give a little, end up giving the lot. Vito would accept nothing less than complete surrender to his will. It would be a battle to the death. She saw no other course. She was fighting for her own emotional survival.

'Dio! Madre di Dio!' The sudden eruption of anger took her by complete surprise, so calm and so cool had he been over the past days. 'What do you want from me? The past is past,' he stressed fiercely.

'You're my past and you're here!' she shrieked back at him, losing control with a speed that shook her. 'I can't get away from you!'

'I have tried so hard to be reasonable,' Vito raked back at her. 'You didn't even smile for the wedding photos!' Ashley loosed a wild laugh, seething at him from the back of a carved settee. 'If you want a smiling bride, you certainly don't need me!' she condemned explosively. 'You've got them all over the place in all your houses. Carina ... everywhere I look! Surprise, surprise, there's another one on that table!'

Taken aback, Vito followed her accusing finger to the source. He flashed her a glittering appraisal. 'I'll have them all put away. Or would a ceremonial burning be more appropriate?'

'Meaning?' she launched back at him furiously. 'You're jealous,' he murmured very quietly, though the idea was a positive revelation to him.

Halted on the tremulous edge of another outburst, she gritted her teeth. 'Insulted by your insensitivity,' she contradicted. 'But then, with your track record, that's nothing new to me!'

Slamming out of the room, she raced up to her bedroom and locked herself in the bathroom. As she peeled off her clothes and stepped under the mercifully cooling flow of water from the shower, she wondered why, in Vito's company, her greatest enemy was nearly always herself. She lost control, she opened her mouth too wide and that was usually that.

When she emerged from the bathroom she expected him to be in the bedroom but he wasn't. That infuriated her. She wasn't finished with him yet. Dragging the towel from her head, she started to ease a comb through the tangled ma.s.s of her hair. So absorbed was she in the task that she didn't hear him enter; she suddenly saw him in the mirror. Reaching over her head, he took the comb from her suddenly nerveless hand and calmly began to employ it with a dexterity that took her back four years.

'Don't do that,' she said weakly.

'It was insensitive of me to say it out loud. I should have savoured it in silence,' he drawled mockingly. 'Why don't you do us both a big favour and leave alone?'

'But you know the answer to that.' His reflection threw back the reckless, dangerous glitter of the smile his sensual mouth. Ashley sat there like a statue while he removed the last snarl from her hair. But as his hands cupped her shoulders to slowly draw her up from the dressing-table, she started to tremble.

'This ... us.' He seemed to savour the words. 'It's inevitable.'

Under that dark spell, she had to struggle to find her voice. 'Doesn't have to be.'

The sash of her robe slid free and she stopped breathing. Already she could feel the anguish of her body's antic.i.p.ation. He pulled her back against him, burying his mouth hungrily in the curve of her arched throat, his hands sliding up her ribcage to find the aching fullness of her taut b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She moaned as expert fingers toyed with the prominent buds of her nipples, an unbearable spasm of excitement seizing hold of her. 'Why should you be able to fight it when I can't?' Vito demanded roughly, a husky, masculine growl of arousal in his accented drawl as he tugged her round to take her mouth.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

THAT taunt powered Ashley's revolt. With a superhuman effort she denied herself the drugging heat of his mouth and broke free. Twisting away, hating herself, she rubbed at her reddened lips as though she needed to cleanse herself of his touch. 'But I can fight it,' she swore, as much for her own benefit as his.

'Why fight yourself?' Vito murmured softly. 'You want me. I believe that you want me more than you have ever wanted any other man. That's why you fight me. With me ... you feel threatened.'

The calm confident a.s.surance banished the colour from her cheeks. 'And what book of pop psychology did you dig that out of?' she managed shakily. 'Don't think I don't know why you want to think that. From your point of view it's a very flattering interpretation.'

'Is it?' Mercilessly he held her eyes with his own. 'In my life many women have wanted me, cara. To be desired is scarcely a novelty.'

Hatred flashed through her. It was the truth. He had it all. Power, wealth, charismatic attraction and the kind of banked-down smouldering s.e.xuality that magnetised the female s.e.x. It had never surprised her that she had fallen madly in love with Vito. But the force of those feelings had terrified her. Her fragile security had been based on a need for total control of her own life. Instinctively she had known that, given the smallest opportunity, Vito would dominate her, making her choices for her, carving her up and rearranging her into the image he wanted.

'So what picked me out from the common herd?' she prompted with deliberate scorn. A broad shoulder edged up in a graceful shrug. 'Your beauty, your individuality ... and the little things-' 'Such as?' Defensively she folded her arms. A faint smile softened the hard line of his mouth. 'The way you challenge me. The way you deliberately take the opposing view to mine in every discussion whether you believe in it or not. And you make me curious. You're like a Chinese puzzle box.'

A box he intended to open. A mystery he intended to solve. He scared her. Yes, she did feel threatened. He was already stripping away those layers he had talked about, denying her any hiding place.

Tilting his dark head back, he studied her with brilliant dark eyes. 'Why, for example, do you always take cover behind a large piece of furniture when we're having an argument?'

'I don't,' she denied and only then realised that she was standing on the far side of the bed, about as far as she could get from him and still be in the same room.

'You do. Once, it outraged me, but now I'm used to it. Physically you're afraid of me and four years ago I found that incredibly insulting,' he confided, slowly closing the distance between them again. 'How can you be afraid of me when I have never once hurt you? Which brings me to the obvious question ... who did?' Pale as snow and trembling, Ashley let her lashes drop to conceal the ravaged turmoil suddenly br.i.m.m.i.n.g in her eyes. She was incapable of movement as he folded her into his powerful arms, his extreme tension lost on her for she was far too absorbed in her own. 'Because if I ever get my hands on him,' Vito grated in a savage undertone, 'I'll kill him.'

She had not been an abused child. At least she didn't think so. Slaps, shakings, occasional bruises from too forceful hand grips. Her father was a powerfully built man and she had often told herself consolingly that he didn't know his own strength when he lost his temper. But it hadn't been the fleeting physical pain that caused her the most damage ... no, it had been the awareness that she was the only one of her family ever to incite that reaction from him. He had never struck her mother, her sister or her brother, was indeed loud in his disgust of other men who used physical force to subdue those weaker than themselves.

No, what had bothered Ashley the most had been the 'why me?' sensation. Why only her and not her siblings? And somewhere along the line she had started to realise that in her father's eyes she was somehow different, presumably different enough not to inspire the love he had for Susan and Tim. For he did love them. He mightn't show it, and Tim might be his favourite, but he did love them in a way he had never loved his younger daughter. Banishing her from the family circle had cost him nothing ... she was painfully aware of that fact. '

'Who did it?' Vito demanded. Her lashes fluttered and she came back to life again. 'You're imagining things,' she whispered.

'I thought I might be until I saw your face.' Long fingers cradled the tender curve of her jawbone. Golden eyes alight with fury were pinned with naked obduracy to her vulnerable features. 'Who?' he persisted.

Had she been an innocent, she reflected sadly, she might almost have believed that he really cared. Hot tears p.r.i.c.ked her eyelids and she couldn't understand why his response should make her cry. 'It...it was a long time ago,' she muttered. 'Leave it. Some things are private.'

'Not between man and wife.'

'I'm not your wife!' she reb.u.t.ted fiercely.

His hand tightened on her shoulder, imprisoning her. 'You are my wife, and the sooner you accept that fact, the happier you'll be. And while you're working on that,' he advised, 'accept at the same time that I will never use my superior strength to hurt you.'

A long shudder ran through her. There were worse kinds of pain he could inflict. The sort of pain that left no visible mark. Four years ago he had been remarkably adept at that brand of cruelty. How could she cope with a male so brilliant at penetrating her defences? How could she fight this ridiculous deluding sense that somehow it was a relief?

'Some day you're not going to need to fight me any more,' he told her levelly. 'Some day you will learn to trust me.'

'You're not just ambitious, you're a megalomaniac.'

'I just don't like failure,' he countered darkly. 'And somehow at some stage, without even realising that it had happened, I failed with you.'

The admission sent chill sparks of dread down her taut spine. What more did he want from her? Love? The undying devotion he had sought in the past and been denied? Helplessly she shivered, shrinking from an awareness of how complete would be his revenge if she fulfilled that aspiration. And she was vulnerable. Wasn't it time she faced that truth? He was holding her close and there wasn't a cell in her body failing to fire to that proximity. Below her breastbone, her heart was pounding like crazy.

'Failure,' he repeated huskily as he drew her unresisting figure down on to the bed. 'A black spot of dishonour on a perfect record. I can't live with it.' With every word he reinforced her deepest fears. Casually he lifted her slender hand. He pressed his his mockingly to the platinum band on her wedding finger. 'Does it feel like a manacle?'

Breathing rapidly, she said, 'A stranglehold. A symbol of possession. I'm surprised you don't want Cavalieri tattooed all over me in case I stray!'

'You won't be straying, cara. I'm very careful with my possessions.'

'd.a.m.n you!' she began, trying to sit up.

He ran the tip of his tongue down the valley between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s in an erotic foray only halted by a meeting with the towelling edge of her robe. She fell back again momentarily stunned by the rush of heat fired by that most calculating preliminary.

'Dio ... I almost forgot.' Reaching behind him, he produced a familiar little box. One-handed, he deftly opened it and extracted a tiny pill. 'Medical science does have its advantages. I thought about them over dinner and I'm prepared to compromise-'

Bewildered, she parted her lips. He dropped it in and automatically she swallowed. 'But you-'

'We don't need it to happen this soon. Success might conclude other pleasures that are for the moment. .. for me at least,' he conceded raggedly, 'far more important.'

An odd little twinge of pain coloured her relief at his change of heart. He could not have told her more clearly that for him pregnancy would be a s.e.xual turn-off, or possibly the final act of the whole charade he had involved her in.

'Aren't you pleased?' he probed.

'Ecstatic ... but you want everything I've got to give in return,' she whispered tightly, understanding that, for this present forbearance on his part, there would be a price.

A questing hand closed over one small firm breast and her eyes slid shut in an involuntary reflex, every tiny muscle tautening beneath her skin in a hot rush of antic.i.p.ation.

'And that's incredibly generous, isn't it?' he said thickly. 'Considering that I could take it without asking.'

His other hand skimmed down the pale length of her thigh and her senses leapt wildly. Her own hands dug like talons into the embroidered bedspread beneath her, so fierce was the temptation to touch him. She would submit, that was all. Nothing more, nothing less.

Laughing softly, he divided the robe, bent his dark head over her quivering stomach and let his mouth roam over her responsive flesh. 'I'm going to drive you out of your mind,' he promised.

Shedding the twin of her own robe, he rearranged her on the bed as if she were a doll. She collided with the rapacious hunger glittering in the all-male appraisal devouring her pale body, lingering on the swell of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and the sleek curve of her hips. And she burned all over, self-conscious in one sense but strangely proud in another.

She was breathing very fast as she looked up at him, her tormented green gaze wandering from his broad shoulders down to the rough curling hair defining his muscular chest and beyond to his hard flat stomach. About there, she closed her eyes tightly, willing herself into stillness and silence.

He closed his mouth round a rosy nipple and teased her with his teeth. A whimper of stifled sound escaped her. She felt the erotic pull deep in the pit of her stomach like a key turning in a lock. He leant over her, delving his tongue between her soft lips and plundering the response she could not withhold. She was shaking, alternately hot and cold with the force of her own arousal. It had happened so fast, she couldn't control it.

His slim hands moved over her with ruthless precision, now hard, now gentle and always, always one agonising step behind where she needed them to be. She couldn't stay still, she couldn't stay quiet. He was slowly and inexorably working down her quivering length, leaving no part of her untouched. His teeth nipped playfully at a sensitive spot on her thigh and her back arched, the heat building to a cruel pitch as his fingers toyed with the damp auburn curls crowning her most tender flesh. She moaned out loud, choking back his name, panting for breath.

'Let go,' he demanded. 'Or I'll make you let go.' And then he did what she had never allowed him to do before, something so intimate it was unbearable, something so exciting, it drove her right off the edge. Parting her locked thighs, he buried his mouth against that most secret place and tasted her, and after that there was nothing she could do but feel. A primitive avalanche of wild sensation took over and wave upon wave of explosive pleasure shuddered through her in an earth shattering climax of pa.s.sion that took all else before it.

'You're mine, absolutely, unequivocally mine.'

Not quite sure she was even conscious, she felt her eyes cling to him as he knelt at her feet, surveying her with triumph. Hard hands curved to her hips as he pulled her to him and there wasn't a resistant bone in her body. He drove into her hard and deep until she didn't know where she began and he ended. Her heartbeat slammed into overdrive as he set a savage rhythm. Her skin, slippery with sweat, slid exquisitely against his and she was suddenly, incredibly at fever pitch again, her fingernails raking the smooth damp skin of his back in that instant of raw, electrifying pleasure that freed her from the chains of the mortal world.

Afterwards, it was a long time before he released her from his weight. And she didn't want him to move. She wanted him to stay where he was forever. She felt glorious, and at the back of her woozy mind she knew that sensation wasn't likely to last. He rolled free and lay back for a few brief minutes, silent, in a damp golden sprawl of satiation on the other side of the bed. Incautiously she leant her chin on her elbow and looked at him, only to realise that his att.i.tude of relaxation was highly deceptive. His superb bone structure was starkly apparent beneath his dark skin, grim tension etched into the forbidding line of his mouth. Without warning, he leapt off the bed, s.n.a.t.c.hed up his robe and shrugged into it. She couldn't believe that he was just going to walk out after what they had just shared. Indeed, she let him get as far as the door before she was provoked into speech. 'I'm sorry, sir. Did I disappoint you?'

Lightning-fast, he spun back, the black brilliance of his gaze stabbing into her. 'That isn't amusing.'

Her eyes wide to hold back the scorching moisture welling up, Ashley retorted, 'It wasn't supposed to be. But I shouldn't have to tell a male of your experience that there's a certain form for these occasions-'

'And you would know all about that, wouldn't you?' His nostrils flared with distaste. 'How many other men have there been?'

She went white and regretted challenging him, but pride had demanded that she refuse to allow him to treat her in such a fashion. He had said that she was his wife. A husband didn't make love to his wife and then get up and leave her to sleep elsewhere without a word or even a gesture.

'Tell me,' he invited rawly. 'I want to know.'

'I don't think now would be the most auspicious time,' she said thickly, choking back the humiliated tears clogging up her throat.

'My imagination runs riot,' he intoned harshly. 'I'd prefer the truth.'

'You wouldn't recognise the truth if it bit you.' Tense as a bow string, her eyes huge in her drawn face, she whispered, 'I won't allow you to treat me like this. You said ... you said the past was past-'

'How the h.e.l.l can it be, when every time I touch you it comes alive again?' he slung back at her fiercely between gritted teeth. 'Do you think I want to feel like this? Do you think I enjoy lowering myself to ask such degrading and shameful questions?'

'What do you want? A list of names, places and times?'

Beneath her appraisal he went satisfyingly rigid. 'M-maybe you'd like me to score the names on this list,' she stammered, sick with revulsion.