Читать книгу The Heat Of Passion - Линн Грэхем, LYNNE GRAHAM - Страница 5

CHAPTER ONE

EBONY-BLACK hair against a crisp linen pillow, brown skin against a blindingly white sheet, and tiger’s eyes burning with blatant cruelty and triumph into hers. In horrified rejection of the imagery that had sprung into her mind, Jessica shuddered violently, dimly aware that she was still in the grip of severe shock.

Abruptly, she was dredged from her turmoil by the insistent shrill of the telephone in the hall. Reluctantly she answered the summons, carefully shutting the lounge door behind her so that her father was not disturbed.

‘Jessica...?’

She froze, her stunningly beautiful face white as snow between the silken wings of her silver-blonde hair. Her breath caught in her throat in a strangled gasp. The receiver dropped from her nerveless fingers and swung towards the floor.

That voice, that truly unforgettable voice...deep, dark and rich as golden honey. He said her name as no one else had ever said it. She hadn’t heard him speak in six long years and yet recognition was instantaneous and terrifying. Her throat closing over, she bent down to retrieve the phone.

‘I am so sorry to have startled you,’ Carlo Saracini purred, lying between his even white teeth.

Her own teeth clenched. She wanted to reach down the telephone line and slap him stupid. And feeling that way again...feeling that alien surge of raw violent hatred which he alone invoked ... scared her rigid. Her mouth went dry. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’m in a very generous mood,’ he imparted with a husky edge to his slow slightly accented drawl. ‘I’m prepared to offer you a meeting—’

Her fingers clenched like talons round the receiver. ‘A meeting ... why?’

‘Can it be that you haven’t seen your father yet?’ he murmured.

She went white. ‘I’ve seen him,’ she whispered, not troubling to add that Gerald Amory was still in the room next door.

‘Embezzlement is a very serious offence.’

‘He had gambling debts,’ Jessica protested in a feverish undertone. ‘He panicked...he didn’t mean to take the money from the firm! He was borrowing it—’

‘Euphemistically speaking,’ Carlo inserted with more than an edge of mockery.

‘Amory’s used to belong to him,’ Jessica reminded him with helpless bitterness.

‘But it doesn’t now,’ Carlo traded softly. ‘Now it belongs to me.’

Jessica’s teeth gritted. Six years ago, burdened by the demands of a wife with expensive tastes, ageing machinery and falling profits, Gerald Amory had allowed Carlo to buy the family firm. Duly reinstalled as chief executive, her father had seemed content and, with new equipment and unparalleled export opportunities through the parent conglomerate, Amory Engineering had thrived.

Guilt stabbed like a knife into Jessica. If it had not been for her, Carlo Saracini would never have come into their lives. If it had not been for her the firm would still have belonged to her father. If it had not been for her, Gerald Amory would not now be facing criminal charges for embezzlement. Nausea stirred in her stomach, churned up by a current of raw loathing so powerful, she could taste it.

‘Dad intended to repay the money... if it hadn’t have been for the audit, you wouldn’t even have found out!’ she said in desperation.

‘Why do you think I spring occasional surprise audits on my companies?’ Carlo enquired gently. ‘Employees like your father get greedy and sometimes they get caught as he has with their hands trapped in the till.’

Jessica trembled, her heartbeat thundering deafeningly in her eardrums. His deliberate cruelty appalled her. ‘He wasn’t greedy... he was desperate!’

‘I’m willing to meet you tonight. I’m staying at the Deangate Hall. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you which suite I’ll be occupying. Eight,’ he specified. ‘I will wait one minute past the hour, no more. If you’re not there, there’ll be no second chance, cara.’

Aghast at the site he had specified and absolutely enraged by his instinctive sadism, Jessica gasped, ‘Don’t waste your time! I’ll see you in hell before I set foot inside that hotel again!’

‘You must have been quite a sight limping out on one shoe that afternoon,’ Carlo mused provocatively. ‘The chambermaid found the other one under the bed. I still have it. Cinderella’s slipper—’

‘How dare you?’ she seethed down the phone in outrage.

‘And as I recall it, you damned near left something far more intimate behind,’ Carlo breathed reflectively.

Scarlet to her hairline, Jessica slammed down the receiver before she could be further reminded of her own appalling, inexcusable weakness that day. No, the very last thing she wanted to think about right now was that day at the Deangate, six years ago.

No more, she wanted to scream, no more. But of course, she wouldn’t. Jessica didn’t scream. Jessica hated to lose control. She had grown up sobbing silently behind closed doors, covering her ears from the sound of her mother screaming at her poor father. And she had sworn then that she would be different and that her own fiery temper would be subdued by every means within her power. She would be strong without passion. And if she stayed away from the passion, she would not be hurt.

The worst thing of all now had to be looking back, seeing how she had broken her own rules and how she had suffered accordingly. Struggling to escape those frightening echoes from the past, Jessica returned to her father.

Grey with strain, he glanced up and began talking again, not even acknowledging that she had been out of the room, so cocooned in his own problems that he might as well have been on another planet.

‘I had to hand over all my keys ... even my car keys. I wasn’t allowed to enter my own office again,’ Gerald Amory relived painfully. “Then I was escorted out of the building by two security guards... it was a nightmare!’

Those must have been Carlo’s instructions. Hadn’t her father deserved just a little bit more consideration? Couldn’t he have been allowed to retain even a tiny sliver of dignity?

*Dad...’ Her voice suspended by choking tears, Jessica darted across the room to offer comfort but her father pulled away from her.

‘I would have treated a thief the same way—’ The admission was stark.

‘You’re not a thief!’

But Gerald Amory made no response.

Every which way Jessica looked, she felt responsible. She should have been there for her father, should have seen that he was in trouble. A week after Carlo had bought Amory Engineering, Jessica’s mother had walked out and started a divorce. The amount of cash from the sale had proved too severe a temptation for Carole Amory. Bad as the marriage had been, Gerald Amory had been utterly devastated. Her father had adored her mother. He had been terrifyingly loyal and forgiving through her every extra-marital affair. He would have done anything to keep her ... he had crawled, begged, pleaded. The only person relieved by Carole’s departure had been her daughter.

But she should have seen the immense vacuum that had opened up in her father’s life. She had watched him turn into a workaholic, living and breathing business and profit because that was all he had left. Why hadn’t it occurred to her that, as the firm thrived and made all the money her greedy mother could ever have wanted, her father must have bitterly resented the fact that the firm was no longer his and that those healthy profits had come too late to sustain his shaky marriage?

But gambling ... ?

‘It was somewhere to go, something to do,’ he proffered while she stared back at him aghast. ‘And then I started losing and I thought I couldn’t go on losing forever...’

The silence went on and on and then abruptly and without any warning, Gerald Amory rose heavily from his seat and moved with the shambling gait of a much older man towards the front door.

‘Where are you going?’ Jessica demanded, her violet eyes almost purple with the strength of her distress.

‘Home ... I need to be on my own, Jess ... please understand that.’

In despair, she hurried down the path after him, ‘Dad, we can cope better with this together! Please stay,’ she pleaded.

‘I’m sorry. Not now, Jess,’ he breathed tightly, unable to look at her.

Cope with the shame, the publicity, the court case? With the loss of his home, his job, his self-respect? Would he be able to cope? It was a tall order, she registered dully, especially for a man of his age. But what alternative was there? You coped, you survived. If Jessica had learnt anything in recent years, it was that truth. Yet struggle as she did she could no longer keep her mind fully focused on her father’s problems. The past was surging back to her, the past she had buried six years ago...

The day she had met Carlo Saracini she had been in London, shopping for her trousseau in the company of a friend. It had been less than two months before her wedding to Simon. She hadn’t been wearing her engagement ring. One of the stones had worked loose and it had been in the jeweller’s for repair.

She had been standing chatting to Leah at a busy intersection, waiting on the lights changing so they could cross. Somebody behind her in the crowd had pushed her and she had fallen into the road, practically beneath the wheels of Carlo’s chauffeur-driven limousine.

She didn’t remember falling. She had knocked herself out. What she did remember was coming dizzily back to consciousness before the ambulance arrived and focusing on the most extraordinary golden eyes above hers. She had been suffering from concussion. As a child she had had a story-book about a tiger with eyes that were pools of brilliant gold. So, naturally she had stared. She had never before seen eyes that shade.

‘Stay still... don’t speak.’ Carlo had been rapping out autocratic instructions in every direction, including hers.

‘I’m fine—’

‘Keep quiet,’ she had been told.

‘It’s only my head and I want to get up...’ She had begun trying to move.

A brown hand like a giant weight had forestalled such daring.

‘Look...I want to get up,’ she had said again, embarrassed eyes flickering over the gathering crowd of onlookers.

‘You are not getting up... you could have injured your spine.’

Her temper had begun to spark. ‘My spine is OK...I’m OK—’

‘We will have a doctor tell us that.’ He had continued to stare down at her with the most phenomenal intensity and then he had run a forefinger almost caressingly along her delicate jawbone. ‘I shall never forgive myself for hurting something so incredibly beautiful...’

Leah had been totally useless, having hysterics somewhere in the background. Jessica had found herself in a private ambulance, accompanied not by her friend but by Carlo.

‘She will follow in my car,’ he had asserted, getting in the way of the paramedics while simultaneously telling them what to do.

She just hadn’t had the strength to fight Carlo Saracini off that day. Her head had been aching fit to burst and her stomach churning with nausea. She had shut her eyes to escape, telling herself that this volatile and domineering foreigner was simply attempting to make amends for an accident which hadn’t been his fault in the first place.

She had been taken to a clinic, subjected to an alarmingly thorough examination against her will and tucked into a bed in a very expensively decorated room.

‘I want to go home,’ she had protested to the nurse. ‘This is so unnecessary.’

Carlo had strode through the door, splintering waves of vibrant physical energy that seemed to charge the very atmosphere and drive out all tranquility.

‘Where’s Leah?’ she had whispered, shaken that he was still around.

‘I had her taken home. She was too distressed to be of any assistance. I understand that your parents are abroad and will not be home until tomorrow. Do you wish me to contact them?’

‘I don’t even know your name,’ she had begun through clenched teeth.

‘Carlo Saracini,’ he had murmured with a slashing and brilliant smile. ‘How do you feel?’

‘I just want to go home... don’t you ever listen to anything people say?’

‘Not if I don’t want to hear it,’ Carlo had admitted.

‘Look, all this...’ She had indicated the fancy room with embarrassment. ‘It’s not necessary. I fell into the road. Your car didn’t touch me. It’s not as if I’m going to sue you or anything, and all this fuss—’.

‘Is my wish,’ he had inserted silkily, scanning her slender shape beneath the bedclothes with blatant appreciation, making her cheeks ignite into sudden colour and sweeping up to her face with yet another smile. ‘I can’t take my eyes off you. You may have noticed that. Then, you must be accustomed to a great deal of male attention.’

‘Not since I got engaged,’ she had muttered stiffly, infuriated by the fashion in which he was openly looking her over as if she were an object on a supermarket shelf there for the taking.

He had stilled, golden eyes narrowing and flaring. ‘You belong to another man?’

‘I belong to no man, Mr Saracini!’ Jessica had snapped.

‘You will belong to me,’ he had murmured with utter conviction.

She had honestly thought he was nuts. Nobody had ever talked to her like that before. Mind you, she had been to Greece once on holiday and had noted that radical feminism had yet to find a foothold there. But that a male dressed with such apparent sophistication in a superbly tailored mohair and silk blend suit, a male who spoke with an air of culture and education, should make such primitive statements had astonished her.

‘I’m getting married in six weeks,’ she had informed him flatly, involuntarily studying his strikingly male features before she realised what she was doing and hurriedly looked away again.

‘We’ll see...’ And Carlo had laughed indulgently, the way you laughed when a child said something innocently amusing.

Jessica sank back to the present and discovered that she was shivering. Her first thought was for her father. No matter what he said, he shouldn’t be alone. Grabbing up a coat, she let herself out of the tiny cottage she rented and climbed into her car to drive over to his house.

‘But your father’s at work, Mrs Turner. What would he be doing home at this time of the day?’ Her father’s housekeeper studied her with a questioning frown.

Jessica swallowed hard, fighting to keep her face unconcerned. ‘I thought he was finishing early.’

‘Well, he didn’t mention it to me.’

‘I’ll catch him later.’ Jessica climbed back into her car.

Dear God, where had her father gone? She must have been out of her mind to let him wander off like that in the state he was in! Another little voice asked her what she was doing. Her father had said he needed time on his own. She was not his keeper. Shouldn’t she respect his wishes? But the nagging sense of urgency nibbling at her nerve-endings wouldn’t leave her alone.

Reluctantly she went home again. Carlo... she couldn’t get Carlo out of her mind. Would she go to the Deangate Hall Hotel to crawl and beg and plead as once her father had done with her mother? Her stomach gave a sensitive heave. What would be the point? She knew Carlo Saracini. There was no way he would let her father off the hook. Carlo wanted revenge. He couldn’t touch Jessica but he knew just how deep the bond was between father and daughter. It would be a sweeter revenge than any that dark Machiavellian intellect might have calculated.

‘Some day you will come to me on your knees and beg me to take you... and I will break you.’

,As she remembered, perspiration dampened her short upper lip.

Carlo Saracini had destroyed her life. He had hacked to pieces everything she held dear. Her love for Simon, her happiness, her tranquillity... and in the end her self-respect. She had fought him to the very last shred of her endurance and then had learnt the secret of her own frailty in a shattering hour of self-discovery. Shuddering with disgust, she shut out the memories but the humiliation and the shame lived on as strongly as ever.

Carlo was one hundred per cent predator. Ruthless, unforgiving, utterly intolerant of those weaker than himself. She would never ever forget the way he had looked at her on her wedding-day. With smouldering incredulous fury and naked hatred. The Alpha male, fabulously rich, indecently successful and stunningly hand some...rejected. Right up until the very last moment Carlo had expected her to change her mind and fling herself at his feet.

‘I will never forgive you.’

Carlo Saracini’s parting assurance outside the church door. She had been shaking so badly by that stage, Simon had practically been holding her upright. She looked like a ghost in the wedding photographs. Simon had assured her that he had forgiven her but as she lived day in, day out with the farce of her marriage, she had never been able to forgive herself.

Jessica raised an unsteady hand to her pounding temples, struggling with the greatest of difficulty to retain her concentration. Why on earth hadn’t she realised before now that her father was in trouble? She had been too involved in her own problems, she acknowledged wretchedly.

Simon bad been ill for a long time before his death. His business had crashed in the recession, leaving nothing but debts. Her father had urged her to come home but she had refused. She hadn’t wanted to turn into the Daddy’s little girl she had been before her marriage. She hadn’t even had a job in those days. All she had ever thought about as a teenager was marrying Simon and having children. She shoved that particular recollection away with helpless bitterness.

Carlo had invited her to the Deangate to gloat over her father’s downfall. A sadist to the backbone, he wanted to experience her pain personally. Why should she give him the satisfaction when she knew that he would not allow her father to go unpunished? No way was she going to keep that appointment at the Deangate Hotel!

Jessica climbed out of her car. It was dark and cold and wet, just like that other day long ago, that day she couldn’t bear to remember. She straightened slight shoulders, tightened the sash on her serviceable beige raincoat and lifted her head high as she crossed the car park. This was for her father. This was her duty. So what if she felt physically sick at the prospect of seeing Carlo Saracini again? She owed this meeting to her father.

If the opportunity to watch her squirm gave Carlo a kick, maybe...just maybe it might be possible to persuade him to mitigate the severity of the punishment he was doubtless planning. Naturally the money would have to be repaid. And the only way that could be done would be by the sale of her father’s home. And since houses didn’t sell overnight, Carlo would have to be prepared to allow time for that sale to take place. All that she would ask would be that he did not drag her father through court and utterly destroy him.

Was that so much to ask? she wondered tautly as she approached the reception desk of the Deangate Hotel. Yes, it was a great deal to ask of a male of Carlo’s ilk.

‘Can I help you?’ a smiling receptionist asked, jolting her out of her reverie.

‘My name is Turner. I have an appointment with Mr Saracini at eight,’ Jessica advanced with all the appearance of a job-hunter, mentioning an interview.

‘I’ll call up... Mrs Turner.’ The young woman’s eyes flicked over the wedding-ring on Jessica’s hand.

Jessica moved away a step or two, a nervous hand brushing up to check the sleek severity of the French pleat she had employed to confine her eye-catching hair.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Turner...’

Jessica turned back. ‘Is there a problem?’

‘Mr Saracini...’ The brunette cleared her throat awkwardly.

‘Yes?’ Jessica pressed tightly.

‘He says that he does not recognise your name—’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Jessica breathed in deeply, hot pink abruptly washing her ivory pale complexion as she belatedly understood. Carlo had taken exception to her marital name. One slim hand braced on the edge of the desk. She swallowed hard on her fury. ‘Try Amory,’ she suggested thinly.

‘Amory?’ the receptionist repeated with a perplexed look.

‘Just tell Mr Saracini that a Miss Amory is here,’ Jessica enunciated between gritted teeth.

‘You can go up,’ she was told ten seconds later.

The lift disgorged two couples in full evening dress. She walked in, her heart in her throat. The Deangate Hotel was one of the most expensive country house establishments in Britain. It lay five miles out of Barton and few locals had the income required to avail themselves of such unashamed luxury. Jessica had always hated the place. This was where her mother had come to meet men. This was where she had trysted with her lovers. And there was a peculiar agony to Jessica’s awareness that it was in this very same establishment that she had forever lost her claim to the moral high ground.

Had she been smug and pious in those days? Her mother had once accused her of that...

‘You’re just like your father,’ Carole had condemned with bitter resentment. ‘You’re so bloody virtuous, you ought to be wearing a halo! So smug, you make me sick! But you won’t get through life like that. Some day you’re going to fall off your pedestal and fall flat on your pious little face and it’ll serve you damned well right!’

And she had fallen, boy, had she fallen. With an inner shudder of distaste, Jessica stepped out of the lift, outraged by the direction of her thoughts. She had come here without allowing herself to think of what she had to face at journey’s end but the eerie familiarity of her surroundings was like a razor twisting inside her.

Six years ago, she had stalked along this corridor in a rage to tackle Carlo Saracini. And even this length of time after the event it was quite impossible for her to explain how she had very nearly ended up in his bed. The two of them ... like animals, her clothing half off, his hands on her body, her hands on his. Obscene, she reflected with a stab of revulsion. And had it not been for the noisy entrance of the chambermaid into the lounge next door to the bedroom, that disgusting incident might have gone considerably further than it had.

Youth had given her an edge, she appreciated now. Youth often knew no fear. That had been her strength at the beginning. She really hadn’trealised what she was up against. Carlo Saracini, a shark in a sleepy backwater. Superbly clever, insidiously calculating and terrifyingly dangerous. Fear might have protected her, but she hadn’t learnt to fear him until it was far too late.

But she was scared now, scared enough to please even the most merciless sadist. Not scared for herself ... but for her father. An old-fashioned gentleman, who had grown up in a far different world from Carlo Saracini’s.

She came to a halt in front of the door and briefly closed her eyes. Crawl, she told herself. That’s what he wants. And if he gets what he wants, maybe destroying her father would seem less appealing. She knocked the door and braced herself. It was opened almost immediately by a young man.

‘Come in, Miss Amory,’ he said gravely.

The lounge of the suite was unchanged. Her fluttering gaze fell on an overstuffed lemon brocade sofa and helplessly she thought, It started there. Her skin burned.

She heard Carlo say something in Greek. The product of a marriage between an Italian and a Greek, Carlo was . equally at home in either language. Her spine stiffened. He strolled into view and the door slid softly shut behind her.

Jessica couldn’t take her eyes off him. He repelled her. Every earthy, oversexed inch of him absolutely repelled her and there was a certain deadly attraction to that amount of revulsion, she told herself. He moved with the grace of a prowling tiger. He had the face of a dark fallen angel and the stunning magnetism of a very physical male.

She studied the dark planes of his impassive features, the clear golden eyes set beneath winged black brows and the savagely high cheekbones which lent such fierce strength to his face. Her gaze glossed over the stubborn jut of a decidedly Greek nose and the wide perfection of his narrow mouth before hurriedly falling away.

‘I bet he’s a voracious lover,’ her mother had murmured throatily the first time she met him. ‘He has an incredible sexual charge. I could feel it fifty feet away... any woman with red blood in her veins would. What’s wrong with you?’

Jessica shivered. The red blood in her veins was chilling fast. Carlo was so cold. Although he betrayed nothing visually, she could feel that. And for some reason she couldn’t understand that made her feel physically cold and threatened.

Suddenly the silence was something she might drown in and she leapt into speech. ‘Why did you invite me here?’

‘Take off your coat.’

Her tongue crept out and moistened her dry lower lip. ‘I’m not staying—’

‘Go, then,’ he murmured with a dismissive flick of one lean hand. ‘You waste my time—’

Her teeth clenched. She undid her sash, dropped the coat off her shoulders and cast it aside. ‘I asked you why you invited me here.’

‘I wanted to look at you.’ Burnished golden eyes skimmed over her slender figure, resting on the surprisingly full thrust of her breasts above her tiny waist and sliding with insulting cool down over the feminine swell of her hips.

Jessica had never been at ease with her own body. Her voluptuous curves and her silver-blonde hair drew male eyes like beacons. Both attracted the wrong kind of male attention. She looked like her mother and she despised that awareness. If she hadn’t possessed a distressingly opulent shape and unnaturally bright hair which ironically was entirely natural, she would never have caught Carlo Saracini’s attention six years ago.

Her eyes glittered like brilliant amethysts as she withstood his inspection with her chin as high as she could hold it.

‘Would you like a drink?’ he drawled.

‘No, thank you.’

He poured himself a glass of champagne. ‘I hate to celebrate alone but I understand that you’re afraid of touching alcohol around me. I’m surprised you’re still that naive,’ he remarked softly.

‘What are you celebrating?’ She ignored the dig about alcohol, drawing on every scrap of icy dignity she possessed.

‘You’re a widow,’ he delivered with smooth emphasis.

Jessica was shattered by his can dour, brutally reminded that Carlo had no inhibitions and, similarly, little respect for ordinary standards of decent behaviour.

‘My father—’

Carlo straightened to his full six feet three inches and shifted a silencing hand, dark golden eyes gleaming over her pallor. ‘He stole from me and from his employees. We know that. Do we really need to discuss it?’

‘Do you have to be so callous?’ Jessica demanded, abruptly unfreezing from the spot to move forward in unconscious appeal. ‘He made a huge error of judgement—’

‘The prisons are full of people who make huge errors,’ Carlo incised, his nostrils flaring. ‘Theft? Such a sordid crime and yet so personal—’

‘P-personal?’ Involuntarily, she stammered.

‘It was for your sake alone that I bought Amory Engineering at an inflated price. What you might call a gesture of good faith towards your family—’

‘Good faith?’ A choked laugh fell from her lips as she studied him with unhidden loathing and disbelief. ‘You don’t know what good faith is. It was blackmail. You tried to put pressure on me by playing on my family’s financial position—’

‘I was demonstrating that I look after my own,’ Carlo cut in with ruthless precision.

‘Your own?’ she repeated with revulsion. ‘I was never yours!’

A winged ebony brow was elevated. ‘You were mine the first moment our eyes met but you were too stupid and craven to face that reality—’

‘How dare you!’

‘How dare you enter this room where you lay with me and try to deny what happened here between us?’ Carlo demanded with blistering contempt.

She wanted to hit him. She wanted to scream back from the depths of her humiliation. But she wouldn’t allow herself to be drawn. ‘My father—’ she said very deliberately.

‘Was the most cosseted employee I have ever had,’ Carlo interrupted. ‘I allowed him complete autonomy over a company which was no longer his and in return I expected loyalty, not common theft.’

‘He can sell his house and pay back every penny!’ Jessica swore furiously. ‘Isn’t that enough for you?’

‘Your family home carries two mortgages. Why do you think he stole?’ Carlo returned drily. ‘I wish to hear no more on the subject.’

‘He’s desperately ashamed of himself.’ Jessica hadn’t known that the house was mortgaged. She concealed her dismay with difficulty.

‘This subject bores me.’ Carlo sent her a grim glance.

‘I have no interest in your father except as a means to an end. You can’t influence my judgement with sentimental pleas. There is no sentiment in business—’

‘So you simply brought me here to gloat?’ she gathered with flashing eyes and a look of glowing scorn. ‘You make me sick, Carlo. I will stand by my father through whatever you throw at him—’

‘You like weak men, don’t you?’ he said silkily ‘Men who need mothering and support, men who make you feel that you’re the one in the driver’s seat. Maybe if I’d wept and plucked violin strings instead of demanded, you would -have come to me instead...’

‘Don’t be crass.’ Jessica was trembling with a rage that was becoming increasingly hard to control. ‘I would never have come to you. I hated you for your primitive macho outlook and—’

‘I am not primitive.’ The insertion was immensely quiet but the temperature had shot up. ‘I have Greek blood.’

For a split-second she was tempted to laugh. So vast an amount of blatant pride and arrogance dwelt in that assurance. But then she clashed with golden eyes that burned with the ferocity of a tiger about to pounce and all desire to laugh was stolen from her. Instantly the alarm bells rang in a frantic peal inside her head. That ferocious, utterly terrifying temper... She found herself instinctively glancing round to measure the distance to the door.

‘And you are not my equal. You proved that six years ago!’ he shot at her. ‘Most conclusively did you prove your stupidity—’

Her small hands clenched into fists. ‘If you call me stupid just one more time, Carlo, I won’t be responsible for what I do!’

‘Per Dio,’ he murmured with a brilliant, slashing smile. ‘If I push a little more, will you rip off my shirt and beg me to take you the way you did the last time?’

‘Dear God, how can you talk to me like that?’

‘Easily. Then,’ Carlo spread two very expressive hands, ‘I have no respect for you. What did you expect?’

The rage was beginning to gain on her self-control. She was having a very tough time holding it in.

‘You behaved like a whore—’

‘You swine!’ she positively spat at him, powered by a tremendous wave of aggression.

‘You were true neither to me nor to Turner,’ Carlo drawled with caustic bite. ‘He offered marriage. I offered something less secure. You went for the wedding-ring. And you lost.’

‘I married the man I loved ... I didn’t lose anything!’ Jessica slung back hotly, her adrenalin pumping madly through her veins.

Carlo threw his darkly handsome head back and laughed uproariously. ‘Are you telling me that you didn’t think of me in the dark of night? That you didn’t crave the passion I alone could give you? If you’d responded to him the way you responded to me, he’d have run away from you in terror!’

Jessica launched herself at him like a lioness. Two incredibly powerful hands snapped round her wrists and held her back. An insolent smile curved his hard mouth. ‘You dress like a fifty-year-old spinster but you’re a little animal at heart, aren’t you, cara? I scratch the surface of that ladylike exterior and I find teeth and claws. I like that. It excites me—’

‘You filthy swine...shut up!’ she screamed.

‘And it excites the hell out of you too!’ Long fingers hauled her closer as she attempted to kick him. He caught both flailing hands in one large male hand and pinned them behind her back, forcing her closer, staring with sardonic amusement down into her blazing violet eyes and pressing a long muscular thigh against her stomach as she twisted and tried to apply a well-aimed knee. ‘All that howling sexual frustration just begging to be released. I could take you now here ... up against the wall, on the floor, anywhere and you’d love it!’ he asserted with rawly offensive confidence. ‘Is that what you want?’