'Take it from me, Cavalieri influence would be overkill.' She spoke through stiff lips. When we part ... Last time a cheque-book, this time a new job. Whatever you want, I can give you, he might as well have said ... but he couldn't give her what she most wanted. She felt sick with longing, sick with self-disgust. He hadn't touched her since that night. He said goodnight to her after dinner every evening and went off to his computer terminal in the study he used as an office while she went to bed alone. He stayed up to all hours, seeming to thrive on just a few hours' sleep. Was the idea that she had had other lovers really that distasteful to him? Or was there a far less complimentary reason behind his unexpected restraint? It was perfectly possible that he no longer found her desirable. Familiarity bred contempt, didn't it?

'Where exactly were you employed?' 'Nowhere you would know.'

'Why are you being so secretive?'

'Look!' She took a deep breath and murmured wryly, 'I dropped out of university, Vito.'

He surveyed her in disbelief. 'You what?' 'I failed my exams.'

'Failed?' he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed with flattering astonishment.

Baldly she issued the facts.

'But why didn't you resit your exams?'

'I wasn't well and my father withdrew his support.' 'Why?'

'Because he found out that I had been living with you.'

Succinctly he swore. 'Isn't there a student loan system available?'

'I was already in a lot of debt, Vito. With no support from home there was no way I could manage to survive and study at the same time.'

He was very pale. 'And still you wouldn't take my money. The view from your side of the fence grows more distressing with every word you say.'

She had upset him. Yet revenge should have made him gloat. He had deeply resented her ambition once, not because he was uncomfortable with ambitious women but because she had apparently put ambition higher on the scale than him. 'It's all water under the bridge now.'

'So how have you lived?' he demanded grimly. 'Like everyone else, I work. For a while, I worked in a store. Don't be such a sn.o.b, Vito!' she snapped, seeing him flinch.

'I am not a sn.o.b,' he ground out. 'But I am understandably very disturbed by what you have told me.'

'Oh, come off it. If you'd still been around when I'd failed, you'd have loved it!' Ashley condemned bitterly. 'It would have saved you the trouble of telling me that my needs and ambitions came a poor second to yours. But I wasn't surprised, Vito. When I was seventeen, my father told me when I wanted to learn to drive that if G.o.d had meant women to drive they would have been born with wheels! The two of you would have been good company for each other in the prehistoric caves!' 'I have no intention of trying to defend myself when you are in this mood.'

'I think a defence would really tax your ingenuity.'

She refused to speak to him all the way back to the house. It was childish, but she relished the chance to get her teeth into some resentment and use it to hold him at bay. She might be in love with Vito, but that didn't mean she had forgotten what a ruthlessly selfish swine he could be. There had never been a worse mismatch of personalities, she told herself.

'We're too alike,' he sighed.

She blanched, wondering whether he could read minds into the bargain.

'Hot-tempered, strong-willed and self-centred.' 'I am not self-centred.'

He slanted her an incredulous look. 'In the entirety of our relationship four years ago you never gave a single thought to how I might feel about anything. You told me how you felt. You told me what you wanted. You told me what you would do. Never once did you consider how I might feel.'

She was shaken by his censure, unwillingly recalling how defensive she had been, how aggressively determined not to compromise in any quarter.

'And because I loved you I played the game, but playing the game by someone else's rules never came naturally to me,' he delivered. 'If I don't win any awards for retrospective sensitivity, it was not entirely my fault.'

'You never loved me.' She picked fiercely on the one bit she could argue with, refusing to concede defeat.

He didn't bother to combat the accusation and she wanted him to, which in turn angered her more. Of course he hadn't loved her. A man in love didn't immediately run off to marry another woman. But in the midst of that thought came a stark acknowledgement of other facts, facts she should have put together sooner. Vito had believed she was living with Steve. Wouldn't that have been enough to convince him that his future would never lie with her? And that Carina, familiar to him from childhood, would make a far more suitable wife?

Not that that excused him for abandoning her as completely as he had. How could he have so easily accepted that she had turned immediately to another man for comfort? Then he had indicated to Ashley that he had had considerable doubts about her even before he had grounds for such suspicion. Possibly it had been a relief to find an excuse to exclude her completely from his life. But that exclusion had made him bitter.

The second week of their stay drifted lazily past. Ashley had taken to lounging by the swimming-pool in the afternoons, napping under the shelter of a huge umbrella. Vito was spending more and more time in the study. She was starting to feel like the untouchable woman and the tension was building again, resulting in stilted sentences and lingering silences. The lack of s.e.x was probably getting to him, she reflected painfully. Even if he wasn't tempted in her direction, Vito was a very virile man and the frustration of their situation had to be annoying him. It really was the most peculiar honeymoon.

Bored, she walked into the house in search of another magazine. Priya was struggling to arrange flowers in the hall with a complaining toddler clinging to her knees like a limpet.

Grinning, Ashley bent down. 'Who's this?'

'My youngest grandchild, Nuwan.' Priya sighed wearily. 'My son-in-law, he is in hospital in Kandy and my daughter has gone to be with him.'

'Nothing serious, I hope?' Ashley was busy making interesting shapes with her hands to attract the little boy's attention.

'An appendix. The operation is today.'

'Let me take him out into the garden. It's such a beautiful day.'

Priya protested, but the enthusiasm with which the child was greeting Ashley's advances was not lost on her. Nor had it escaped her attention that her employer's wife was eager for something to do.

Two hours later the only sound in the lush grounds was Nuwan's tinkling laughter as Ashley played with him. Half an hour beyond that, he had fallen asleep with the suddenness of the very young, curled up in her arms, trusting that he would be held in comfort until he chose to wake. Priya brought out a tall gla.s.s of lime juice on a silver tray and clucked at the signs of weariness on Ashley's face.

'You should rest, madam,' she fussed anxiously. 'It is not good for the baby for you to be too tired.' As the sleeping child was retrieved by his grandmother, Ashley froze. Priya wasn't referring to her grandson.

The little woman gave her a teasing smile. 'You think I don't know?' She laughed. 'I have eleven children and twenty grandchildren. I am very wise to the coming of new babies ... he wonder why you tired all day, he wonder why you don't want this food ... that food. And it is in your face. How do you say? A fullness? I see it. I know. You tell him soon, make him very happy man.' As Priya trudged back to the house, Ashley drew in a. deep, shaken gasp of the hot still air. It wasn't possible. But it was possible, a little voice crowed. That night in London when that desperate yearning pa.s.sion had overwhelmed every other restraint. Shock made her break out in nervous perspiration. She hadn't thought, she hadn't dreamt, she hadn't even wanted to consider the risk she had taken that night.

And now all of a sudden it seemed obvious. She had been so taken up with the complexities and strains of their relationship that she had been blind to the evidence of what was directly beneath her nose. The nausea, the dizziness, the exhaustion. None of them as p.r.o.nounced as they had been the last time, but then this time she had been able to rest and relax, waited on hand and foot as she was. Some frantic calculations were required before she could gauge the likelihood of conception. Dazedly she appreciated that her period was ten days overdue.

'I watched you with Priya's grandson.'

Her head spun, pink washing her cheeks. Lean and darkly tanned in denim cut-offs that moulded his narrow hips and long, muscular thighs, Vito looked quite staggeringly attractive. With difficulty she dragged her eyes from his rawly masculine physique. 'I thought you were working.'

'I didn't marry you to spend my days locked into a computer.'

No, he had married her to have a child and then for some unfathomable reason had temporarily shelved that ambition. A ludicrous urge to laugh threatened her shaky composure. She was still deep in shock over the awareness that she might already be pregnant. His change of heart had come too late to save her. But, even as she thought that, an ache of maternal hunger stirred in her, an ache as old as time. She stifled it, forbidding herself any images of warm, cuddly little bodies. Even if she was pregnant, she was convinced that she would very probably have another miscarriage. Bitter pain a.s.sailed her. How could he put her through this again? The agonising disappointment and the sense of failure would be all the keener a second time.

In the unresponsive silence, Vito murmured in measured tones, 'For a woman who doesn't like children, you're remarkably talented at entertaining them.' The remark was explosively unwelcome. 'I never once in my life told you that I didn't like children!' she slammed back shakily. 'And why shouldn't I be good with them? That's the job I trained for. .. or it was my job until you came along and wrecked that as well!'

Vito's bewilderment was palpable. 'Your job?'

'I was working in a children's nursery.' Stuffing her feet into sandals, she set off down the sloping lawns towards the trees.

'And why couldn't you tell me that before?'

Brown fingers had captured her slim forearm to hold her still.

Furiously she thrust his hand away. 'It was none of your business!'

As she left the dark cloaking cover of the trees, he caught up with her again. They stood in a verdant sunlit glade where a natural pool had formed, fed by a mountain stream. It was a hidden place, a peaceful haven where the lush vegetation was allowed to riot and the orchids to bloom, safe from the taming lawnmowers and clippers that kept nature in order in the more formal gardens. Somewhere she could hear the raucous screech of a peac.o.c.k calling to his mate and in the background still the fluttering wings of all the exotic birds they had disturbed in their noisy pa.s.sage.

She clashed with the smouldering darkness of his brilliant eyes. 'Can't you understand that I want to be alone?'

'Greta Garbo you're not. Stop moving away,' he bit out warningly.

Angrily she halted that instinctive retreat, although she felt intimidated by the sheer size of him this close. 'I can see that giving you s.p.a.ce was a mistake.' 'And what's that supposed to mean?' she demanded nervously.

His nostrils flared. 'I left you alone in the hope that you would use that time to come to terms with our marriage but all you have done is withdraw from me again. I wanted you to acknowledge the bond between us and come to me.'

'Bond?' she echoed. 'Come to you?' She went off into gales of wild laughter at the very suggestion that she might have approached him. Would he have expected her to walk on coals of fire afterwards as an encore? It seemed that nothing short of craven, crawling surrender would satisfy Vito.

A flash of naked fire lit his gaze as he stared down at her intensely vivid face. 'Don't,' he said softly. 'Don't what? Don't laugh?' She felt vaguely unhinged, as though he had somehow set her adrift.

The pure male vibrancy of his dark, set features merely increased her need to fight him. 'Do you really think I don't know how you feel? You want to scratch and claw me like a tiger to keep me at a distance but it won't work,' he spelt out. 'This marriage isn't a contest. It's not about winners or losers. In fact, were you to win on the terms you believe you want now, I wonder just how long it would take you to appreciate that, after all, you had lost.'

Involuntarily she was finding herself trapped by the golden blaze of his eyes. 'If you knew how I felt, you wouldn't be talking about losing. I hate you!' she swore vehemently, still sufficiently in control to defy him.

'No, you're afraid to trust me,' he contradicted arrogantly. 'You don't hate me.'

'I hate you!' she repeated wildly. 'I hate you! I hate you!'

Ashley was trembling. She could see what he was trying to do to her now. At the outset she had asked herself which was stronger, his desire for a son or his desire for revenge, and on their wedding night he had answered that question for her by postponing the first so that he could concentrate on the latter. Something akin to terror was snaking through her; the horrific thought that Vito would dismantle her defences brick by brick until finally he had her so completely in his power that he would know that a great deal more than physical attraction held her to him.

'I'll never love you again! Do you hear me?' she launched at him stridently, recklessly.

Disorientating, a brilliant smile softened the fierce line of his mouth. 'I should corner you at least twice a day and make you lose your head. By the end of a week, I'd know you inside-out. .. every secret. .. every thought. So, you believed that you loved me in your way, if not in mine, four years ago?'

Aghast at what she had conceded in temper, she began to swing away from him. 'You're not going anywhere.' A powerful hand intercepted her before she could move.

In the grip of absolute desperation, she lifted her arm and aimed a hefty slap at him. Vito tipped his head back and unbalanced her with remarkable agility, strong hands clamping round her waist to push her back on to the gra.s.s. Finding herself unexpectedly in a supine and far more vulnerable position, Ashley made a violent attempt to dislodge him. Vito laughed uproariously and pinned her flat, trapping her flailing hands in both of his. 'Uh-uh-uh!' he scolded. 'You are in a panic, aren't you? Hit and run. The last resort in your repertoire.'

Like those of a tiger cub at bay, her green eyes were on fire with defiance. 'Why are you doing this to me?'

Momentarily a wry look of acceptance seemed to cloud his unashamed amus.e.m.e.nt. 'I can't seem to get close without getting physical. So be it, cara. All your s.p.a.ce just took a hike. I've withdrawn a privilege which didn't seem to be gaining me any ground.'

Her heart hammering crazily against her ribs, she gazed up into the implacable dark features suspended mere inches from her, suddenly starkly conscious of the scanty nature of her bikini. Still holding her hands flat with his, he took her mouth with all the savage hunger of a male who felt he had been exercising an unnatural and unappreciated brand of restraint.

A stab of raw sensation fired in the pit of her stomach. His tongue penetrated deeply between her lips, fanning the fire into a positive blaze. He went on kissing her until her lips were bruised and red and her bones were melted honey beneath her burning skin. Only then did he pull away and brush aside the bikini bra with impatient fingers, immediately bending his dark head to rub his mouth erotically across a taut pink nipple.

'I want you unbearably,' he confided. 'I want you so much that when I take you it will be like dying and being reborn.'

She moaned, her head thrown back as his hands cupped her b.r.e.a.s.t.s in a fierce possession. He rolled over and, catching her clenched fingers, drew them down to his taut, flat stomach, pressing them against the b.u.t.ton on his waistband. 'I want everything the way it was,' he admitted raggedly. 'I want to wake up at dawn with you making love to me.'

'No,' she whispered breathlessly, vivid s.e.xual imagery from memories she had buried deep living again inside her mind. But her body was already betraying her. The need to touch him as intimately as he touched her was a torment of desire fighting the last remnants of her control. Theirs had never been a one-sided loving. Dimly it occurred to her that in bed they had been true partners, neither one of them giving or taking more than the other.

He claimed her parted lips in a glancingly sweet caress that was a torment to senses already roused to a frightening pitch of excitement. In an unashamed admission of need, he pushed her hand against the hard bulge of his manhood, constrained by the unyielding denim, and the hunger that surged up inside her was uncontrolled. 'This ... this I will have,' he breathed unsteadily, 'though you deny me all else.'

He was trembling, the sheen of sweat on his smooth golden skin testifying to the extremity of his arousal, and she knew then with a wild flash of satisfaction that he was no more in control than she was. But that wasn't what made her move closer and send her lips whispering over the flat male nipple she discovered amid the black, silky whorls of hair clouding his broad chest. That wasn't what made her skate teasing fingers across his unbelievably taut abdomen and feel him jerk and groan beneath her caresses. No, what drove her was the all-encompa.s.sing knowledge that in this he was hers, absolutely and completely hers in a way that he would never be any other woman's, and that was in that moment as powerful and seductive as the strength of her own desire.

With every inhibition released, she became a creature of alluring abandon, glorying in her own freedom. When the seducer became the seduced, the lines that had once divided them blurred until there was nothing between them but a mutually exclusive pa.s.sion that burned out of control throughout what remained of the daylight hours.

It was as though they had never been apart, but even in the past their loving had never been so pa.s.sionate or intense. When he finally settled between her thighs, she reached up to cup his damp cheekbones and claimed a tempestuous kiss as her right; those lines had faded altogether. As lost as she in the grip of that voracious desire, he shuddered and groaned deep in his throat in response and then he entered her wildly, deeply, and proceeded to make love to her with a thoroughness that exceeded her most colourful fantasies.

When it was over, she lay with her head against his chest, listening to his heartbeat still racing against her, gloriously at ease and at peace in the imprisoning circle of his arms. It was like dying and being reborn, she thought weakly, and afterwards it was like waking up in paradise, so intense was the release from her own body. For the first time she felt really close to him, so close that the first fingerings of alarm entered paradise and she tensed.

Vito tightened his hold on her instantly, smoothing a caressing and confident hand over her small head as if he were soothing a restive child. His touch felt tender, gentle, and was extraordinarily comforting. She remembered that, in all her life, the only time she had ever felt safe was in his arms.

'Maybe at the end of the year I might consider tempting your kid brother with another Ferrari.'

The illusion of paradise shattered into shards that pierced her flesh in all the most tender places. Like a madwoman, she found herself wanting to weep and shriek and tear at her hair in a painful ecstasy of despair. She couldn't go back. She couldn't go forward either. The past would always intervene. Vito had the forgiving qualities of a Cesare Borgia. And he would stand by the last letter of that unholy agreement.

CHAPTER NINE.

'IF YOU were a feline, you'd purr like a motor, mia cara.' Planting a teasing kiss to her brow, Vito straightened from the bed. Fully dressed and emanating waves of disgusting energy, he smiled down at her. 'I suppose you won't consider stirring yourself and having breakfast with me for a change?'

'No.' Her answer was m.u.f.fled by the sheet and she was holding herself still as a statue, too well aware that the moment she attempted to sit up would also be the moment when she was most likely to throw up.

He chuckled and strolled across the room with all the lean, lazy grace of a hunting animal, replete after a good meal. 'I'll see you later.'

The last time she hadn't been this sick. The doctor at the hospital had said that her lack of sickness might well have been a sign that her pregnancy was unstable. The a.s.surance had been small comfort four years ago, and at that rate this dreadful nausea she was presently suffering ought to be an indication of the most stable pregnancy of all time!

Priya appeared with a dry biscuit and a cup of aromatic herb tea. It was very hard to eat lying flat but Ashley did her best. The older woman muttered worriedly about her needing to see a doctor and Ashley ignored the advice. This morning scene had become routine ever since Priya found her being violently ill in the bathroom, and with a little bit of quick thinking Ashley had turned her into a partner in collusion to conceal her condition from everyone else in the household. She had lost a baby before, she had forced herself to confide. This time she didn't want to raise Vito's hopes unnecessarily, she had said. Priya had understood such a motive. In her culture men were to be protected at all times from upsetting experiences. That was a woman's duty.

Oh, yes, no doubt at all, she was pregnant. She required neither test nor examination to confirm the fact. Already her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were swelling and incredibly sensitive, and if she hadn't been convinced that it was far too soon for her waist to start expanding she would have sworn her skirts were getting uncomfortably tight. Maybe she would blow up like a balloon by the third month, she reflected miserably. For how long could she hope to keep her secret?

Vito shared her bed every night. Vito made love to her every night. For that matter, Vito made love to her in the afternoons as well. In fact, this was just about the only time of day when he kept his hands off her. And she liked it that way, in fact she loved his constant hunger for her, revelled in this one hold she had over him, basic though it was.

Overflowing with self-pity, she blinked back tears and sniffed. She ought to be ashamed of herself. She should have told him a month ago that she might be pregnant, and then in all likelihood he would have left her alone. If she had any pride at all she would have long since grabbed at the first excuse she had to keep him at a distance. The trouble was ... well, the trouble was that she might be living in a fool's paradise but she was so happy. She had never been this happy before, and she managed that feat entirely by blocking out the fact that this was not a normal marriage. She took each day as it came.

But tomorrow they were returning to London. The honeymoon would be over and all she had to look forward to was a miscarriage and the certainty that once that happened Vito would see the writing on the wall and let her go. Unless she could manage to hide that from him as well. Maybe it would happen when he was abroad ... or maybe it wouldn't happen at all. She rested her palm protectively against her stomach. She wanted the baby so much that it hurt and no way could she have both Vito and the baby. She would have to go away and have it somewhere where not even all the Cavalieri wealth and influence could contrive to find her. Somewhere like the moon or Mars, she thought crazily.

Just before lunch she came downstairs, breathtakingly beautiful in an emerald dress as green as her eyes, an inner glow blazing from her lovely face so powerfully that Vito faltered in the conversation he was having on the phone. He caught her hand, planted a kiss in the centre of her palm and returned his attention with visible difficulty to the phone.

'It must be the air here,' he murmured, dark eyes almost dazedly pinned to her radiance. 'You get more gorgeous with every pa.s.sing day.'

'You're just susceptible.' She looked like a cat contemplating a large, rich bowl of cream as she studied him, possessiveness surging through her veins in a heady surge. She couldn't take her eyes off him, either. There was a powerful electrical charge in the atmosphere. It lit her up like a high voltage shot of energy.

'Madre di Dio, you're going to kill me,' he whispered, mesmerised by her sensual smile. She bit into a luscious grape, headily conscious of the effect she was having on him. So, on his side it was only the best s.e.x he'd ever had ... so what? She loved him. She was willing to settle for second best, willing to live for today at the expense of bitter regret tomorrow. If this was the only happiness she was fated to have in her life, she was ready to grab it with two greedy hands.

'I want my lunch,' she said.

'And it's our last day,' he reminded her with obvious reluctance. 'You said you would like to see the elephants again.'