Читать книгу Second-Time Bride - Линн Грэхем, LYNNE GRAHAM - Страница 5

CHAPTER ONE

TARA stood in the doorway, a daunting five feet nine inches of teenage truculence. ‘Why do I have to go to Aunt Janet’s?’

‘Because that’s what you do on Saturdays if I have to work.’ Daisy shimmied her slender hips into a burgundy skirt while frantically trying to do up her blouse with her other hand, one anxious eye on her daughter, the other on the clock by the bedside. ‘And if you’re at Janet’s I don’t have to worry about you.’

‘Yeah, so, like, it’s not for my benefit, it’s for yours.’ Dark brown eyes rested accusingly on her much smaller parent.

‘Look, can we have this out tonight?’ Daisy begged, feverishly digging through the foot of her wardrobe for two matching shoes.

‘I’m thirteen and I’m not stupid. I wouldn’t drink or do drugs—’

‘I should hope not,’ Daisy muttered with a compulsive shudder.

‘And I’m not like you were. I’m really sensible and mature for my age—’

‘Why do I sometimes get the impression that I’m no giant in your opinion?’

‘Mum, you’re bound to be a worrier! You got taken in and rolled out by a major creep at seventeen and you’ve been paying for it ever since because you got stuck with me,’ Tara reminded her ruefully. ‘But I am not going to make the same mistake. Unless Mr Impossibly-Rich-and-Handsome comes knocking on the door while you’re out, you’re safe! I just want to go down to the market with Susie and buy a new top. All the best things will be gone if I have to wait until this afternoon—’

‘I have never felt stuck with you!’ Daisy protested.

‘Mum...we haven’t got time to get into that sort of stuff. The market?’ Tara pleaded.

Daisy hurried through the gilded glass doors of Elite Estates exactly forty-five minutes later, breathless and feeling harassed but trying not to look it. Her boss, Giles Carter, had phoned first thing to inform her that the virus doing the rounds of the agency had knocked out the boy wonder on the sales team—Barry the Barracuda, as Daisy thought of him in private. Her presence was required to deal with Barry’s latest new client on what should have been a much cherished day off.

Daisy had worked ten years for Elite Estates and had no illusions about management chauvinism. She was the token woman on the sales staff. She had fought her way up the office ranks with the greatest difficulty, disadvantaged by her sex, her lack of height and her youthful appearance. It had taken hard sales figures to persuade Giles to take her seriously but he still ensured that she dealt only with the properties at the lowest end of the market.

‘Giles has phoned down for you twice,’ Joyce on Reception told her in a warning hiss. ‘And boy, have you got a treat in store...’

Daisy felt a cold chill down her back. Giles had never given her a treat in his life. She always got the difficult clients. ‘It’s not that old lady back again, is it? Mrs Sykes?’

Joyce laughed. ‘Didn’t you notice the limousine out front?’

Daisy had been in too much of a hurry to notice anything. Now she looked and saw the impressive long silver vehicle parked outside.

‘The most utterly dreamy-looking guy I’ve ever seen got out of it,’ Joyce sighed in a languishing undertone. ‘Sadly, an utterly dreamy-looking blonde got out with him.’

A couple... Hopefully the type who still liked each other and respected each other’s opinions. Daisy had had some nightmare experiences with twosomes who hadn’t been able to agree on anything when it had come to the home of their dreams. Last-minute pull-outs on sales had been the result.

She knocked on the door of Giles’s sumptuous office and walked straight in.

It was the woman she saw first. She was studying her watch with a little moue of annoyance, a fabulous mane of corn-gold hair partially concealing her features. A tall dark male was standing with his back turned to the door. He swung fluidly round as Daisy entered but she couldn’t see his face in the sunlight flooding through the windows.

Giles gave her an exasperated look. ‘I expected you sooner than this,’ he complained ungraciously.

‘Sorry,’ Daisy said to the room at large. ‘I hope you haven’t been waiting too long.’

‘Miss Thornton...this is Mr Leopardi and Miss Nina Franklin.’ Giles introduced them in the oily voice he employed solely around wealthy clients.

Daisy froze. Leopardi. That name thudded into her brain like a sharp blow. Stunned, she stared at the large male presence now blocking out the sunlight. All she could focus on was a pale blue tie set against a slice of snowy white shirt bounded by the lapels of an exquisitely tailored charcoal-grey jacket. Numbly she tipped her silver-fair head back and looked up at him. Disbelief enclosed her in complete stasis. It was Alessio! The shock of recognition was so intense that she couldn’t move a muscle. She simply stood there, all colour drained from her triangular face, her polite smile sliding away into nothingness. The hand she had begun to extend dropped weakly back to her side again.

Helplessly she collided with deep-set dark eyes fixed on her with an incredulous intensity that was as great as her own. And then luxuriant black lashes swept low, swiftly screening his gaze from her. She saw the tautness of his facial muscles beneath the gold of his dark skin, grasped the fierce control he was exerting and, with a huge effort, dragged her shattered eyes from him, fighting to regain her composure.

‘Mr Leopardi...’ she muttered in a wobbly undertone, and began to raise her hand again with all the flair of a malfunctioning automaton.

Alessio ignored the gesture and spun on his heel to address Giles. ‘Is this woman the only employee you have available?’ he enquired harshly.

There was a sharp little silence.

‘Miss Thornton is one of our most experienced members of staff.’ Giles fixed an ingratiating smile to his full lips but his dismay was obvious. ‘Perhaps you think she seems a little on the young side but she’s actually a good deal older than she looks!’

Daisy flushed to the hairline. The beautiful blonde giggled. The thick silence pulsed like a wild thing in a room that now felt suffocatingly airless. She focused on Alessio’s shoes—hand-stitched Italian loafers. She remembered him barefoot and in trainers. That was the only thought in her mind but it speedily flowed on into another.

She remembered a teenage boy, not a full-grown adult male. She knew the adult only from pictures in newsprint that fractured her peace for days afterwards. But how much more disturbing it was to be faced with Alessio in the flesh...and without any warning whatsoever. Her tummy muscles were horribly cramped up. She felt sick, physically sick, and could not have opened her mouth had her life depended on it.

Giles cleared his throat uneasily. ‘I’m afraid that there isn’t anyone else available this morning. If it wasn’t for this—’ he frowned down at the clumsy plaster cast on his foot ‘—I would have been delighted to personally escort you round the Blairden property. As it is—’

‘Alessio... if we don’t get a move on, I’ll be late for my booking,’ the blonde complained petulantly, unfolding lithely from her chair to reveal a height very little short of Alessio’s six feet three.

The woman was a model—a very well-known model, Daisy recognised belatedly, her dazed eyes scanning that impossibly perfect bone structure. She had seen that same face on countless magazine covers. And what had Giles said her name was? Like a sleepwalker, she moved forward and extended her hand. ‘Miss Franklin...’

Manicured fingertips brushed hers only in passing. Bored green eyes flicked dismissively over her. The blonde slid her hand into Alessio’s in a gesture of possessive intimacy and curved right round him to whisper something in his ear, her other hand moving caressingly up over his chest to curve finally to one broad shoulder.

Daisy went rigid and stared. Then abruptly she looked away, but every nerve in her body screamed as she did so. For a split second, as her own fingers had closed tightly in on themselves, she had been tempted to thrust their bodies apart. That insane urge shook her inside out.

‘If you’ll excuse me, I’ll brief Miss Thornton.’ Giles closed a taut hand round Daisy’s elbow and practically pulled her out into the corridor.

His heavy features were flushed and angry. ‘What’s the silent act in aid of? No wonder the bloke wasn’t impressed! Don’t you know who he is?’

Daisy studied the wall opposite.

‘The Leopardi Merchant Bank...that’s who he is! I mean, you just stood there gawking at him! Hell’s teeth, why does the richest client we’ve had in months have to come through the door the one and only day Barry’s away sick?’ Giles groaned in disbelief.

And it couldn’t be happening to a nicer person, Daisy found herself thinking, because it was easier to think about that than to think of what had just happened. Of all the estate agencies in the London area, why had Alessio had to choose this one? Was it because of the grovelling service Giles offered to the well-heeled? Alessio was so rich that he would get that kind of service anywhere. Her temples pounded with sick tension.

‘Hey...you’re not coming down with this blasted virus too, are you?’ Giles demanded, taking an almost comically fast step back from her.

‘No...’ Daisy finally found her voice again. ‘I’m fine.’

‘Then what’s the matter with—?’ Giles fell abruptly silent as the door behind her opened.

‘Since we’re in a hurry, Miss Thornton’s services will be adequate,’ Alessio asserted flatly.

Goose-flesh prickled along the nape of Daisy’s neck. She didn’t turn round even though she could see Giles regarding that scarcely civil oversight with a fresh look of incomprehension. Adequate? Her teeth clenched. Fierce resentment, backed by a rolling tide of humiliation she didn’t want to admit to, flared through her taut length.

Thirteen years ago she had been unceremoniously dumped and she had done nothing to deserve Alessio’s brutally dismissive reaction to her in front of her boss and his girlfriend. Was it embarrassment? Or was he, just like her, fighting off a distressing surge of adolescent memories? Don’t kid yourself, Daisy, a more cynical voice urged. Even at nineteen, Alessio Leopardi didn’t have a sensitive bone in his body...

Rigid-backed, Daisy descended the wrought-iron spiral staircase that ran down to the ground floor, and walked out through the crowded front office. Her legs felt as if they might fold beneath her at any moment. A deep trembling was beginning inside her. Shock was setting in hard. As she emerged out onto the pavement and began turning in the direction of the staff car park, Alessio drawled from behind her, ‘We’ll use the limo.’

‘Of course,’ she managed half under her breath.

‘So tell us about this house,’ Nina Franklin invited thinly as Daisy slid stiffly along the indicated seat opposite her.

Daisy’s lips parted and closed again. She knew virtually nothing about the property in Blairden Square, not even if there were any offers on it. Since Giles had never allowed her to deal with what he termed the ‘superior residences’ on the agency books, she had had no reason to take any interest in them. Starter homes and apartments were generally her field. But had she been in her right mind she would have checked out the facts before she’d left the office.

A glossy brochure landed squarely on her lap. She jumped. Startled violet eyes switched to the male she had been rigorously avoiding looking at.

‘Time to bone up,’ Alessio said very drily, his expressive mouth as hard as iron.

‘You’re not very efficient, are you?’ his companion remarked in cutting addition. ‘High-powered sales routines are painful but total ignorance is something else again!’

Daisy had coloured but she tilted her chin. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t dealt with this particular property before—’

‘It’s a Georgian terrace,’ Alessio slotted in gently. ‘But don’t worry about it. We can read too.’

Daisy bent her head, his smooth derision stinging like acid on her over-sensitive skin. Why was he treating her like this? Alessio was blunt but he had never been a boor. She didn’t understand his apparent need to humiliate her. Surely he couldn’t still be blaming her after all these years? And it was so ridiculous to be forced to pretend that they were strangers. Was that her fault...or his? He had made no attempt to acknowledge their previous relationship either. But then why should he have? Why should either of them want to? That relationship was all but lost in the mists of time, she told herself, until intelligence intervened. How could that long-ago summer ever be lost for her when she had Tara? Her stomach cramped again into even tighter knots.

The buzz of a mobile phone broke the tense silence. Daisy didn’t lift her head. But she couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t even begin to study the brochure. It was as if her whole brain had gone into a state of suspended animation, as if the world had stopped dead the instant she’d glanced up and seen Alessio in Giles’s office. No longer the long, lean youth she recalled but, if anything, even more heartbreakingly handsome...

He had level dark brows, cheekbones sharp enough to cut concrete, an aristocratic blade of a nose, lustrous tawny eyes and a head of glossy black hair, now ruthlessly suppressed into a smooth cut and infinitely shorter than she recalled. His hard-boned features were intensely male, his wide, beautifully shaped mouth pure sensual threat. He could smile and steal your heart with one scorching, teasing glance...but that had been the boy, not the man, Daisy reminded herself painfully.

She flinched as Nina Franklin gave an explosive little shriek of annoyance and thrust the mobile phone back into her capacious bag.

‘I can’t stay!’ she told Alessio furiously. ‘Joss needs me now. I could scream but how can I refuse? He’s done me too many favours. You might as well let me out here. I can walk to the studio faster than you can get me there in this traffic! Look, I’ll try to make it over to the house before you leave.’

‘Relax...it’s not important,’ Alessio murmured soothingly.

‘I could strangle Joss!’ the blonde exclaimed resentfully, and then her green eyes landed on Daisy and hardened to accusing arrows of steel. ‘If you had been on time, this wouldn’t be happening!’

‘Perhaps you would prefer to cancel and make a fresh appointment?’ Daisy suggested with an eagerness she couldn’t conceal.

‘No, I’ll keep this one,’ Alessio drawled.

Stiff as a small statue, Daisy quite deliberately averted her gaze as the limousine stopped; the other woman slid out, but not without many regretful mutterings and an attempt at a lingering and physical goodbye that had car horns screeching in protest as the lights changed. Of course they were lovers. Daisy’s fine features were clenched fiercely tight. The intimacy between them was blatant.

Viewing a house together... Were they getting married? Her stomach twisted as she pondered that idea for the first time. For some reason she suddenly felt as if somebody was jumping up and down on her lungs. The door slammed again, sealing her into unwanted isolation with Alessio, and Daisy stopped breathing altogether.

‘It’s been a day for unpleasant surprises,’ Alessio commented grimly.

Daisy finally got up the courage to look at him again, her strained violet eyes unguarded. ‘Is that why you felt that you had to take it out on me?’

‘You are not one of my happier memories. What did you expect?’ Hard eyes regarded her pale face without any perceptible emotion at all.

‘I don’t know...’ Daisy whispered unevenly. ‘I just never expected to see you again.’

‘Look on this as a once-in-a-lifetime coincidence,’ Alessio urged with chilling contempt. ‘As greedy little bitches go, you’re still top of the list in my experience! I would go some distance to avoid a repeat of this encounter.’

In the pin-dropping silence which ensued, Daisy turned bone-white. Her appalled gaze clung to his set dark features and the cold hostility stamped there. He made no attempt to hide the emotion. Shock rolled over her in a revitalised wave. He despised her; he really despised her! But why? Why should he feel like that? Hadn’t she let him go free? Hadn’t she given him back what he’d wanted and needed and what she should never have taken? Hadn’t that single, unselfish action been sufficient to defuse his resentment?

‘But it is some consolation to learn that you’re now poor enough to be forced to earn a living,’ Alessio acknowledged, his cold eyes resting on her like ice-picks in search of cruelly tender flesh.

‘I don’t understand what you’re getting at... I’ve always worked for a living. And how can you call me a greedy bitch?’ Daisy suddenly lashed back at him, shock splintering to give way to angry defensiveness.

Alessio emitted a sardonic laugh, his nostrils flaring. ‘Isn’t that what you are?’

‘In what way was I greedy?’ Daisy pressed in ever growing bewilderment. ‘I took nothing from you or your family.’

‘You call half a million pounds nothing?’

A furrow formed between her delicate brows. ‘But I refused the money. Your father tried very hard to make me accept it but I refused.’

‘You’re a liar.’ Alessio’s eloquent mouth twisted with derision. ‘My father was not the leading light in that deal. You made the demand. He paid up only because he was foolishly trying to protect me.’

‘I didn’t demand anything...and I didn’t accept any money either!’ Daisy protested heatedly.

Alessio dealt her a look of complete indifference that cut like a knife. ‘I don’t even know why I mentioned it. That pay-off was the tacky but merciful end to a very sordid little affair.’

Daisy bit the soft underside of her lower lip and tasted the acrid tang of her own blood. The pain steadied her a little. Alessio’s father, Vittorio, had obviously lied. Clearly he had told his son that she had accepted the money. And why should that lie surprise her? The Leopardi clan had loathed her on sight. His parents had tried hard to hide the fact when Alessio was around, but his twin sister, Bianca, had shown her hostility openly. Daisy stared into space, her whole being engulfed by a powerful wave of remembered pain and rejection.

In the swirling oblivion of that tide of memory she relived the heady scent of lush grass bruised by their lovemaking, the kiss of the Tuscan sun on her skin and the passionate weight and urgency of Alessio’s lean body on hers. Broken dreams and lost innocence. Her eyes burned, her small frame tensing defensively. Why had nobody ever told her how much loving could hurt and destroy? By the time she had found out that reality, the damage had been done and her reward had been guilt and despair. A ‘sordid little affair’? No, for her it had been so much more, and it was in the divergence of outlook that the seeds of disaster had been sown...

The clink of glass dredged her back from her dangerous passage into the past. Her lashes fluttered in confusion as Alessio leant lithely forward and slotted a brandy goblet between her nerveless fingers. ‘You look like you are about to pass out.’

Faint colour feathered then into Daisy’s drawn cheeks. She watched him help himself to a drink from the cabinet, every movement calm and precise. He did not look as though he was about to pass out. Although if he ever found out about Tara he might well make good the oversight. Hurriedly, she crushed that disturbing, foolish thought. Alessio had never wanted their baby.

At nineteen, Alessio had been able to think of an awful lot of things he wanted but they had not included a baby. So, knowing that, why on earth had she let him marry her? And yet the answer to that was so simple. She had honestly believed that he loved her... deep down inside...even though he hadn’t been showing it any more. It was amazing what a besotted teenage girl could persuade herself to believe, she conceded painfully.

‘And you are wearing odd shoes,’ Alessio remarked in a curiously flat tone.

A feeling of unreality was starting to enclose Daisy but she also sensed that Alessio was not as in control as he wanted to appear. She surveyed her feet, saw one black court shoe, one navy. It didn’t bother her. In the midst of a nightmare encounter, unmatched shoes were a triviality. She drained the brandy in one gulp. It sent fire chasing into the chilled pit of her stomach. She swallowed convulsively. ‘I wasn’t supposed to be working today. I came out in a hurry.’

‘You’ve cut your hair.’

Daisy lifted an uncertain hand halfway to her shoulderlength bob of shining silver-blonde hair, connected with brilliant eyes and wondered why time seemed to be slowing up, why they were now having this curiously stilted conversation when barely a minute ago they had been arguing. ‘Yes. It’s easier to manage.’

Alessio was running that narrowed, gleaming gaze over her slight figure in a manner which made her feel incredibly hot and uncomfortable. A wolfish smile gradually curved his hard mouth as he lounged back with innate grace in the seat opposite. ‘You don’t seem to have much to say to me...’

She wasn’t about to tell him that he was still gorgeous. Even as a teenager he had known that and had shamelessly utilised that spectacular combination of smouldering dark good looks and animal sex appeal to his own advantage. He had used it on Daisy—dug his own grave, really, when she thought about it. She had been agonisingly naive and had fallen like a ton of bricks for him, defenceless against that polished seduction routine of his.

‘You’re still full of yourself,’ Daisy told him helplessly.

A faint darkening of colour accentuated the slant of his chiselled cheekbones, his tawny eyes flaring with momentary disconcertion.

She loosed a sudden laugh, sharp in its lack of humour. ‘But then why shouldn’t you be?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I think it means that you should get me out of this car before I say something we both regret,’ Daisy admitted tightly, feeling all the volatile emotions she had buried so long ago rising up inside her without warning.

Alessio slung her a knowing look redolent of a male who knew women and prided himself on the fact. ‘You never forget your first love.’

‘Or what a bastard he was...’ The assurance was out before Daisy could stop it.

Alessio’s long, lithe frame tensed—a reaction which gave her a quite extraordinary surge of satisfaction. Shimmering eyes lanced into her with stark incredulity. ‘How can you say that to me?’

‘Because being married to you was the worst experience of my life,’ Daisy informed him, throwing her head high.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘And, believe me, I didn’t require a financial bribe to persuade me into a quick exit! You were domineering, selfish and completely insensitive to what I was going through,’ Daisy condemned in a shaking voice that steadily crept up in volume in spite of her attempt to control it. ‘You left me at the mercy of your totally monstrous family and allowed them to treat me like dirt! You stopped talking to me but that did not stop you using my body whenever you felt like it!’

Alessio was transfixed. There was no other word for his reaction. The Daisy he had married would never have criticised him. In those days, Daisy had crept around being quiet and apologetic while silently, miserably adoring him, no matter what treatment he handed out. Alessio had accepted the adoration as his right. She hadn’t had the guts to stand up to him then, not when she had mistakenly blamed herself for the fact that he had had to marry her.

‘In fact you went into a three-month-long sulk the same day that you married me! And the minute your obnoxious family saw how you were behaving they all jumped on the same bandwagon. I didn’t just have one person making my life a living hell, I had a whole crowd!’ she spelt out fiercely. ‘And I don’t care how any of you felt; I was only seventeen and I was pregnant and I did not deserve that kind of punishment!’

Daisy fell silent then. She was shattered, genuinely shattered by the bitterness that had surged up in her and overflowed. Until now she had not appreciated how deep her bitterness ran. But then she had not had an opportunity to vent those feelings before. Within forty-eight hours of her miscarriage, Vittorio Leopardi had presented her with divorce papers. And, sick to the heart from all that she had already undergone and Alessio’s cruel indifference, she had signed without a word of argument.

‘So, when you took the money and ran, you thought it was your due,’ Alessio opined grittily.

She stole a dazed glance at him from beneath her feathery lashes. His darkly handsome features were fiercely taut. ‘I ran but I didn’t take any money,’ she muttered wearily, and then wondered why she was still bothering to defend herself. When it came to a choice between her word and his father’s, she had no doubt about whose Alessio would believe. And it wouldn’t be hers.

‘I despised you for what you did,’ Alessio admitted with driven emphasis. ‘And to listen now to you abusing my family makes me very angry.’

‘I doubt if I’ll lose any sleep over that.’ Yet Daisy’s heartbeat suffered a lurch when she met that anger brightening his hard gaze. Her chin came up, defying the sudden chill of her flesh. She had said her piece. She had waited thirteen years to say it and there wasn’t a single word of it which she could honestly have taken back. How could he still behave as if he had been the only one wronged?

When she had discovered that her miscarriage had not been quite what it had appeared, she hadn’t dreamt of bothering Alessio or his family with what would have been very bad news in their opinion. Indeed, still loving Alessio as she had, she had felt positively heroic protecting him from such an unwelcome announcement. He had wanted neither her nor their child, so she had taken care of the problem. She had kept her mouth shut, let the divorce proceed without interruption and brought her baby into the world alone. Alessio owed her! He had been able to get on with his life again, unhampered by all the many adult responsibilities that had become hers at far too young an age.

The limousine had stopped. She hadn’t noticed. She gazed out at the elegant Georgian square and simply knew that she could not bear another single minute in Alessio’s company. There was too much pain and confusion biting at her.

‘I’m going to catch a cab back to the office and say you cancelled,’ Daisy told him abruptly. ‘Then you can come back on Monday if you like and see the house with someone else.’

‘I don’t think your boss would swallow that story.’ Alessio’s shrewd gaze lingered on her and his expressive mouth took on a curious quirk.

‘I don’t care!’ Daisy stared back at him defiantly.

‘So you still make stupid decisions on the spur of the moment.’

Colour ran up in a hot, betraying flush beneath her fine skin. She knew exactly what he was getting at. ‘Shut up!’ she hissed back.

‘And you still blush like a furnace around me...in spite of your advanced years,’ Alessio chided with lazy enjoyment at her embarrassment. ‘And, in spite of my advanced years, you still turn me on hard and fast. Now isn’t that fascinating?’

Daisy couldn’t believe he had said that. The tip of her tongue stole out in a swift flick to moisten her lower lip. Involuntarily she connected with eyes that now blazed passionate gold, his ebony lashes low on his lingering scrutiny. The heavy silence stretched like a rubber band pulled too taut for safety.

‘If this is your idea of a joke...’ she began unevenly.

Alessio surveyed her with slumbrous intensity and a slow, devastating smile curved his mouth. ‘Don’t be pious. You’re feeling the same thing I’m feeling right now.’

Her breath was trapped in her throat. Daisy could not tear her bemused eyes from the potent lure of his. And it was not an unfamiliar sensation that was creeping over her, she registered in dizzy disbelief; it was an old but never forgotten sensation of quite incredible excitement. The whole atmosphere had a wild, electric charge. Her heartbeat was thundering in her eardrums, her whole body stretched and tight with every nerve-ending ready to leap.

‘Curiosity and excitement,’ Alessio enumerated with purring softness.

It was fatal to be so easily read but Daisy couldn’t help herself. Slowly but surely she was sinking back to the level of maturity she had reached at the time of the party at which they had first met, and she remembered the sheer, terrifying whoosh of emotion and response which Alessio had evoked in her even at a distance of twenty feet. One look and she had been trembling, pitched on such a high of breathless, desperate yearning that she had felt slaughtered when he’d looked away again. ‘Stop it...’ she muttered shakily.

‘I can’t. I like to live dangerously now and again,’ Alessio revealed huskily.

‘I don’t...’ But her wretched body was not so scrupulous. She was devastated to feel her breasts, now full and heavy, surge against the lace barrier of her bra, the swollen nipples tightening into shameless, aching peaks.

‘How would you feel about an afternoon of immoral, erotic rediscovery?’ Alessio murmured thickly, his scorching golden eyes, as hot as flames, dancing over her heated skin. ‘I’ll take you to a hotel. For a few stolen hours, we leave the anger and the bitterness behind and relive the passion...’

Daisy was stunned, and on another level she was recalling the end of that long-ago party when Alessio had finally deigned to speak to her and make the smoothest pass she had ever encountered. She had been stunned then too by his sheer nerve. His brazen disregard of what she had naively seen as normal courting rituals had shocked her rigid. He had planted a drink in her hand and asked her to go to bed with him that night. She had slapped his face.

He had grinned. ‘Tomorrow night?’ he had asked with unconcealed amusement in his beautiful eyes, and she should have known then that it would take more than one slap to dent that ego.

‘Daisy...’ Alessio breathed.

This time she came back to the present with a sense of intense pain. Her violent eyes were starkly vulnerable; she veiled them. All of a sudden she felt horribly cold and lost. ‘I don’t want to relive the passion,’ she told him tightly. ‘Yes, you were quite incredible in bed but I wouldn’t let you use me like that again. Once was enough. You’re trying to put me down this time too. That’s one advantage of being a grown-up: I can see the writing on the wall.’

The endless silence pulsed with fierce undertones.

‘I cannot believe I am even having this conversation with you!’ Alessio gritted with ferocious abruptness.

‘I suppose it’s comforting to know that you haven’t changed. You’re still a two-timing, oversexed, immoral rat,’ Daisy muttered in a choky little voice, valiantly fighting off the threat of the tears damming up behind her burning eyes, ready to spill over.

‘I am none of those things!’ Alessio blistered back at her.

‘Creep,’ Daisy spat, making a dive to get out of the car. ‘You really are one lousy creep to do this to me! Do you think I’m a whore or something? Do you think I don’t know you’re trying to humiliate me?’

A strong hand suddenly whipped out to capture one of hers, holding her back. ‘It was an unfortunate impulse. I don’t know what came over me. Call it temporary insanity if you like,’ he growled savagely. ‘I’m sorry!’

‘Let go of me!’

He did, and Daisy wrenched open the door and almost fell out onto the pavement, sucking in a great gulp of fresh air as she did so. She was shaking like a leaf. She took a tottering step away from the limousine, her gait that of someone who had escaped a traumatic brush with death.

‘And it’s really pathetic to still be shooting the same lines at your age!’ she slung back at him for good measure.

‘Dio...will you keep your voice down?’ Alessio roared at her, causing an elderly lady walking an apricot poodle to step off the pavement with a frown of well-bred disapproval and give the two of them a very wide berth.

Daisy stole a glance at Alessio, took in the shaken look of uncertainty currently clouding his normally sharp-as-paint gaze and grew in stature with the knowledge that he was handling their unexpected encounter no better than she was. Memories from their volatile teenage years and the effects of shock were driving a horse and cart through any effort they made to behave like civilised, intelligent adults.

‘Look, do you want to see this house or don’t you?’ she asked stiffly.

‘If you will control your tongue and stop hurling insults, I see no reason why we should not deal with this on a normal business footing,’ Alessio drawled with icy control.