Читать книгу Blackmailed Into The Marriage Bed - Melanie Milburne - Страница 10

CHAPTER ONE

AILSA DECIDED THERE was only one thing worse than having to see Vinn Gagliardi after almost two years of separation, and that was being made to wait to see him.

And wait.

And wait.

And wait.

Not a couple of minutes. Not ten or fifteen or even twenty, but a whole stomach-knotting, nerve-jangling hour that crawled by like a wet century.

Ailsa pretended to read every glossy magazine Vinn’s young and impossibly glamorous receptionist had artfully fanned on the handcrafted coffee table in front of her. She drank the perfectly brewed coffee and then the sparkling lemon-infused mineral water. She ignored the bowl of breath mints and chewed her nails instead. Right down to her elbow, and if Vinn didn’t open his office door soon her shoulder would be next.

Of course he was doing it deliberately. She could picture him sitting behind his acre of French polished desk, idly passing the time sketching new furniture designs, a lazy smile tilting his mouth as he enjoyed every excruciating minute of the torture she was enduring out here at the prospect of seeing him again.

Ailsa squeezed her eyes shut, trying to rid her mind of the image of his smiling mouth. Oh, dear God, his mouth. The things his mouth had made her feel. The places on her body his mouth had kissed and caressed and left tingling for hours after.

No. No. No. Must not think about his mouth. She repeated the mantra she had been saying for the last twenty-two months. She was over him. Over. Him. There was a thick black line through her relationship with Vinn Gagliardi, and she had been the one to put it there.

‘Mr Gagliardi will see you now.’ The receptionist’s voice made Ailsa’s eyes spring open and her heart stutter like a lawnmower running over rocks. She shouldn’t be feeling so...so nervous. What did she have to be nervous about? She had a perfect right to demand an audience with him, especially when it involved her younger brother.

Although...maybe she shouldn’t have flown to Milan without making an appointment first, but she’d been in Florence for an appointment with some new clients when she got the call from her brother Isaac, informing her Vinn was going to sponsor his professional sporting career. She wasn’t going to leave the country without confronting Vinn about his motive in investing in her brother’s dream of becoming a pro golfer. She’d made up her mind if Vinn wouldn’t see her today then she would damn well camp in his office building until he did. She had her overnight bag with her from her short trip to Florence so at least she had a change of clothes if it came to that.

Ailsa rose from the butter-soft leather sofa, but she’d been sitting for so long her legs gave a credible impression of belonging to a newborn foal. A premature newborn foal. She smoothed her damp hands down the front of her skirt, hitched her tote bag more securely over her shoulder and wheeled her overnight bag with the other hand, approaching the still closed office door with resentment bubbling like a boiling pot in her belly. Why didn’t Vinn come and greet her out here in Reception? Why make her walk all the way to his door and knock on it like she was some servile little nobody? Damn it. She’d been his wife. Slept in his bed. Shared everything with him.

Not quite everything...

Ailsa ignored the prod of her conscience. Who said husbands and wives had to share every single detail of their background? Especially with the sort of marriage she’d had with Vinn. It had been a lust match, not a love match. She’d married him knowing he didn’t love her, but she’d convinced herself his desire for her more than made up for that. She’d convinced herself it would be enough. That she would be enough. But he’d wanted more than a trophy wife. Much more. More than she was prepared to give.

Ailsa was pretty sure Vinn hadn’t told her everything about his background. He’d always been reluctant to talk about the time his father went to jail for fraud and how it impacted on his family’s business. She’d soon got tired of pushing him to talk to her about it and let it slide, figuring she would hate it if he, or anyone for that matter, kept on at her to slide back the doors on her family’s closet. She didn’t have too many skeletons in there, just one big, stinking rotten carcass.

Ailsa stood in front of his office door and aligned her shoulders as if she were preparing for battle. No way was she going to knock on his door and wait for his permission to enter.

No flipping way.

She switched her tote bag to the other shoulder and, grasping her overnight bag with her other clammy hand, took a deep breath and turned the knob and stepped over the threshold to find him standing with his back to her at the window overlooking the bustling streets of Milan. If that wasn’t insult enough, he was seemingly engrossed in a conversation on his phone. He barely gave her a glance over his shoulder, just cursorily waved his hand towards one of the chairs opposite his desk and turned back to the view and continued his conversation as if she were some anonymous blow-in whom he had graciously shoehorned into his incredibly busy day.

A sharp pain seized her in the chest, his casual dismissal piercing the protective I’m over him membrane around her heart like a carelessly flung dart. How could he ignore her after not seeing her for so long? Hadn’t she meant anything to him?

Anything at all?

The conversation was in Italian and Ailsa tried not to listen because listening to Vinn speak in his mother tongue always did strange things to her. Even when he talked in English it did strange things to her. She suspected even if he talked gibberish her spine would still go all mushy and every inch of her skin would tighten and tingle.

While he was talking she took a moment to surreptitiously study him...or at least she hoped it was surreptitious. Every now and again he would move slightly so she could see a little bit more of his face. It was as if he was rationing her vision of him, which was annoying in itself. She wanted to look him in the eye, to see if he carried any scars from their doomed relationship.

He changed the phone to his other hand and turned to the computer on his desk, his brow frowning in concentration as he clicked on the mouse. Why wasn’t he looking at her? Surely he could show a bit more interest? She wasn’t vain but she knew she looked good. Damn it, she paid a lot of money to look this good. She’d bought a new designer outfit for her meeting with her clients and had her hair done and had spent extra time on her make-up. Looking good on the outside made up for feeling rubbish and worthless on the inside.

Vinn moved something on the computer screen and then continued with his conversation. Ailsa was starting to wonder if she should have worn something with a little more cleavage to show him what he’d been missing. He was still as jaw-droppingly gorgeous as the last time she’d seen him. And if she hadn’t been grinding her teeth to powder her jaw would be embedded in the plush ankle-deep carpet right then and there. His jet-black hair was neither long nor short nor straight nor curly, but somewhere sexily in the middle, reminding her of all the times she had trailed her fingers through those thick glossy strands, or fisted her hands in them during earth-shattering, planet-dislodging sex. He was clean-shaven but the rich dark stubble surrounding his nose and mouth and along his chiselled jaw was a heady reminder of all the times he’d left stubble rash on her softer skin. It had been like a sexy brand on her face, on her breasts, between her thighs...

Ailsa suppressed a shudder and, ignoring the chair he’d offered, threw him a look that would have frozen lava. In mid-flow. ‘I want a word with you. Now.’ She leaned on the word ‘now’ like a schoolmistress dressing down a disrespectful pupil.

The corners of Vinn’s mouth flickered as if he were trying to stop a smile...or one of his trademark lip curls. He ended his phone call after another few moments and placed the phone on his desk with unnerving precision. ‘If you’d made an appointment like everyone else then I would have plenty of time to talk to you.’

‘I’m not everyone else.’ Ailsa flashed him another glare. ‘I’m your wife.’

A dark light gleamed in his espresso-brown gaze like the flick of a dangerous match. ‘Don’t you mean soon-to-be ex-wife?’

Did that mean he was finally going to sign off on their divorce? Because they’d married in England they were subject to English divorce law, which stated a couple had to be legally separated for two years. It was strange to think if they had married in Italy they would have been granted a divorce by now because Italian divorce law only required one year of separation.

‘This may surprise you, Vinn, but I’m not here about our imminent divorce.’

‘Let me guess.’ He glanced at the overnight bag by her side and his eyes glinted again. ‘You want to come back to me.’

Ailsa curled her hand around the handle of her bag so tightly her bitten-down nail beds stung. ‘No. I do not want to come back to you. I’m here about my brother. Isaac told me you’re offering to sponsor him for the international golfing circuit next year.’

‘That’s correct.’

She disguised a swallow. ‘But...but why?’

‘Why?’ One dark eyebrow rose as if he found her question ludicrous and her imbecilic to have asked it. ‘He asked me, that’s why.’

‘He...asked you?’ Ailsa’s mouth dropped open so wide she could have parked one of her brother’s golf buggies inside. ‘He didn’t tell me that...’ She took a much-needed breath and, letting go of her bag, gripped the back of the chair opposite his desk instead and swallowed again. ‘He said you told him you would sponsor him but there were conditions on the deal. Conditions that involved me.’

Vinn’s expression changed from mocking to masked. ‘Sit down and we’ll discuss them.’

Ailsa sat, not because he told her but because her legs were threatening to go from under her like damp drinking straws. Why had Isaac led her to believe Vinn had approached him over sponsorship? Why had her brother been so...so insensitive to invite her soon-to-be ex-husband back into her orbit? Vinn’s involvement with her brother’s golfing career would mean she wouldn’t be able to avoid him the way she’d been doing for the last two years.

She had to avoid him.

She had to.

She didn’t trust herself around him. She turned into someone else when she was with him. Someone who had all the hopes and dreams of a normal person—someone who didn’t have a horrible secret in her background. A secret not even her brother knew about.

Her half-brother.

Ailsa was fifteen years old when she stumbled upon the truth about her biological father. For all that time she’d believed, along with everyone else, that her stepfather Michael was her dad. For fifteen years that lie had kept her family knitted together...well, knitted together was maybe stretching it a bit, because there were a few dropped stitches here and there. Her parents, while individually decent and respectable people, hadn’t been happy in their relationship, but she had always blamed them for not trying hard enough to get on.

She hadn’t thought it was her fault.

That the lie about her was the thing that made their lives so wretchedly miserable. But after finding out the truth about her biological father and the circumstances surrounding her conception, she could understand why.

Ailsa straightened her skirt over her thighs and took a calming breath, but then her gaze spied a silver photograph frame on Vinn’s desk and her heart stumbled like a foot missing a rung on a ladder. Why had he kept that? She had given him that frame after their wedding, with her favourite photo of them smiling at each other with the sun setting in the background. Giving him that photo had been her way of deluding herself she was in a real marriage and not one that was simply convenient for Vinn because he wanted a beautiful and accomplished wife to grace his home. She couldn’t see the photo from her side of the desk. Perhaps he had someone else’s image in there now. The thought of it churned her belly into a cauldron of caustic jealousy. She knew it was missish of her since she was the one to walk out on their marriage, but it hurt her pride to think he could so easily move on with his life.

And not just her pride was hurt...

Ailsa had always held a thread of hope that Vinn would fall in love with her. What bride didn’t want her handsome husband to love her? She had fooled herself it would be enough to be his bride, to be in his bed. To be in his life.

But she had longed to be in his heart. To be the first person he thought of in the morning and the last he thought of at night. To be the person he valued over everyone else or anything else. But Vinn didn’t value her. He didn’t prioritise her. He didn’t love her. Never had. Never would. He was incapable of it.

Vinn leaned back in his chair with one ankle crossed over his muscle-packed thigh, his dark unreadable gaze moving over her body like a minesweeper. ‘You’re looking good, cara.’

Ailsa stiffened. ‘Don’t call me that.’

His mouth curved upwards as if he found her anger amusing. ‘Still the same old bad attitude Ailsa.’

‘And why wouldn’t I have a bad attitude where you’re concerned?’ Ailsa said. ‘How do I know you didn’t plant the idea of sponsorship in Isaac’s mind? How often have you been in contact with him since we separated?’

‘My relationship with your brother has nothing to do with my relationship with you,’ Vinn said. ‘That is entirely separate.’

‘We don’t have a relationship any more, Vinn.’

His eyes became obsidian-hard. ‘And whose fault is that, hmm?’

Ailsa was trying to contain her temper but it was like trying to restrain a rabid Rottweiler on a Teacup Chihuahua’s leash. ‘We didn’t have a relationship in the first place. You married me for all the wrong reasons. You wanted a trophy wife. Someone to do little nineteen-fifties wifey things for you while you got on with your business as if my career meant nothing to me.’

A tight line appeared around his mouth as if he too was having trouble reining in his temper. ‘I trust your aforementioned career is keeping you warm at night? Or have you found yourself a lover to do that?’

She put up her chin. ‘My private life is no longer any of your business.’

He made a sound that was suspiciously like a snort. ‘Isaac tells me you haven’t even been on a date.’

Ailsa was going to kill her younger brother. She would chain him to the sofa and force him to watch animated Disney classics instead of the sports channel. She would take away his golf clubs and flush all his golf balls down the toilet. She would force-feed him junk food instead of the healthy organic stuff his sports dietician recommended.

‘Well—’ she gave Vinn a deliberately provocative look ‘—none that he knows about, that is.’

A muscle in the lower quadrant of his jaw moved in and out like an erratic pulse. ‘Any lovers you’ve collected will have to move aside for the next three months as I have other plans for you.’

Plans? What plans? Now it was Ailsa’s pulse that was erratic. So erratic it would have made any decent cardiologist reach for defibrillator paddles.

‘Excuse me?’ She injected derision into every word. ‘You don’t get to make plans for me, Vinn. Not any more. I’m in the driver’s seat of my life and you’re not even in the pit lane.’

He made a steeple with his fingers and rested them against his mouth, watching her with an unwavering gaze that made the hairs on the back of her neck prickle at the roots. But then she noticed the gold band of his wedding ring on his left hand and something in her stomach tilted. Why would he still be wearing that?

‘Isaac will never make the professional circuit without adequate sponsorship,’ he said after a long moment. ‘That nightclub incident he was involved in last year has scared off any potential sponsors. I’m his only chance. His last chance.’

Ailsa mentally gulped. That nightclub incident could well have ended not just her brother’s career prospects but his or someone else’s life as well. The group of friends he’d been hanging around with since school attracted trouble and invariably Isaac got caught in the middle. It wasn’t that he was easily led, more that he was a little slow to see the potential for trouble until it was too late to do anything—his approaching Vinn for sponsorship being a case in point. But if he got on the professional circuit he would be away from those troublemaking friends.

‘Why are you doing this? Why are you involving me? If you want to sponsor him then do it. Leave me out of it.’

Vinn slowly shook his head. ‘Not how it works, cara. You’re the reason I’m sponsoring him. The only reason.’

Ailsa blinked. Could she have got it wrong about Vinn? Had he married her because he loved her, not just because he fancied having a glamorous wife to hang off his arm? Was that why he was still wearing his wedding ring? Had he meant every one of those promises he’d made on their wedding day?

No. Of course he hadn’t loved her.

He had never said those three little magical words. But then, nor had she. She had deliberately held back from saying them because she hadn’t liked the feeling of being so out of balance in their relationship. The person who loved the most had the least power. She hadn’t been prepared to give him even more power over her than he already had. His power over her body was enough. More than enough.

He’d reeled her in with his charm and planted her in his life as his wife, on the surface fine with her decision not to have kids, but then he’d changed his mind a few months into their marriage. Or maybe he hadn’t changed his mind at all. He had gambled on his ability to change her mind.

Gambled and lost.

She glanced at the photo frame again. ‘Is that what I think it is?’

Vinn turned the frame around so she could see the image of their wedding day. Ailsa hadn’t looked at their wedding photos since their separation. She had put the specially monogrammed albums at the back of her wardrobe under some clothes she no longer wore. It had been too embarrassing to look at her smiling face in all of those pictures where she had foolishly agreed to be a trophy wife. She had agreed to become a possession, not a person who had longings and hopes and dreams of her own. Looking at those photos was like looking at all the mistakes she had made. How could she have been so stupid to think an arrangement like that would ever work? That marrying anyone—especially someone like Vinn—would make her feel normal in a way she hadn’t felt since she was fifteen? Their marriage hadn’t even lasted a year. Eleven months and thirteen days, to be precise.

Vinn had mentioned the B word. A baby—a family to continue the Gagliardi dynasty. She would have ended up a breeding machine, her career left to wither, while his business boomed.

Her interior decorating business was her baby. She had given birth to it, nurtured it and made numerous sacrifices for it. Having a real baby was out of the question. There were too many unknowns about her background.

How could she give birth to a child, not knowing what sort of bad blood flowed in its veins?

Ailsa swallowed against the barbed ball of bitterness in her throat and cast her gaze back to Vinn’s onyx one. ‘Why do you keep it on your desk?’

He turned the frame back so it was facing him, his expression now as inscrutable as his computer screen in sleep mode. ‘One of the best bits of business advice I’ve ever received is never forget the mistakes of the past. Use them as learning platforms and move on.’

It wasn’t the first time Ailsa had thought of herself as a mistake. Ever since she’d found out the circumstances surrounding her conception she had trouble thinking about herself as anything else. Most babies were conceived out of love but she had been conceived by brute force. ‘What do your new lovers think when they see that photo on your desk?’

‘It hasn’t been a problem so far.’

Ailsa wasn’t sure if he’d answered the question or not. Was he saying he’d had numerous lovers or that none of them had been inside his office? Or had he taken his new lovers elsewhere, not wanting to remind himself of all the times he had made love to her on that desk? Did he wear his wedding ring when he made love to other women? Or did he take it off when it suited him? She glanced at his face to see if there was any hint of the turmoil she was feeling, but his features were as indifferent as if she were a stranger who had walked in off the street.

‘So...the conditions you’re proposing...’ she began.

‘My grandfather is facing a do-or-die liver transplant,’ Vinn said. ‘The surgeon isn’t giving any guarantee he will make it through the operation, but without it he will die within a matter of weeks.’

‘I’m sorry to hear he’s so unwell,’ Ailsa said. ‘But I hardly see how this has anything to do with—’

‘If he dies, and there’s a very big chance he will, then I want him to die at peace.’

Ailsa knew how much respect Vinn had for his grandfather Domenico Gagliardi and how the old man had helped him during the time when Vinn’s father was in jail. She had genuinely liked Dom and, although she’d always found him a bit austere and even aloof on occasion, she could well imagine for Vinn the prospect of losing his grandfather was immensely painful. She wouldn’t be human if she didn’t feel for him during such a sad and difficult time, but she still couldn’t see how it had anything to do with her.

‘I know how much you care for your grandfather, Vinn. I wish there was something I could do to—’

‘There is something you can do,’ Vinn said. ‘I want us to be reconciled until he is safely through the surgery.’

Ailsa looked at him as if he’d told her to jump out of the window, her heart thumping so heavily she could hear it like an echo in her ears. ‘What?’

‘You heard me.’ The set to his mouth was grimly determined, as if he had made up his mind how things would be and nothing and no one was going to talk him out of it. Not even her.

She licked her parchment-dry lips. He wanted her back? Vinn wanted her to come back to him? As his wife? She opened and closed her mouth, trying to locate her voice. ‘Are you mad?’

‘Not mad. Determined to get my grandfather through this without adding to the stress he’s already going through,’ Vinn said. ‘He’s a family man with strong values. I want those values respected and honoured by resuming our marriage until he is well and truly out of danger. I will allow nothing and no one to compromise his recovery.’

Ailsa got to her feet so abruptly the chair almost toppled over. ‘I’ve never heard anything so outrageous. You can’t expect me to come back to you as if the last two years didn’t happen. I won’t do it. You can’t make me.’

He remained seated with his unwavering gaze locked on hers. Something about his stillness made the floor of her belly flutter like a deck of rapidly shuffled cards.

‘Isaac is talented but that talent will be wasted without my help and you know it,’ he said. ‘I will provide him with not one, not two, but three years of full sponsorship if you’ll agree to come back to me for three months.’

Ailsa wanted to refuse. She needed to refuse. But if she refused her younger brother might never reach his potential. It was within her power to give Isaac this opportunity of a lifetime. But how could she go back to Vinn? Even for three minutes, let alone three months? She clutched the strap of her bag like it was a lifeline and blindly reached for her overnight bag, her hand curling around the handle for support.

‘Aren’t you forgetting something? I have a career in London. I can’t just pack up everything and relocate here.’

‘You could open a temporary branch of your business here in Milan,’ he said. ‘You could even set up a franchise arrangement. You already have some wealthy Italian clients, sì?’

Ailsa frowned so hard she could almost hear her eyebrows saying ouch at the collision. How had he heard about her Italian clients? Had Isaac told him? But she rarely mentioned anything much to her brother about her work. Isaac talked about his stuff not hers: his golfing dreams, his exercise regime, his frustration that their parents didn’t understand how important his sport was to him and that, since their divorce, they weren’t wealthy enough to help him get where he needed to be, etc. Ailsa hadn’t told Isaac this last trip to Florence was to meet with a professional couple who had employed her to decorate their centuries-old villa. They had come to her studio in London and liked her work and engaged her services on the spot.

‘How do you know that?’

Vinn’s mouth curved in a mocking smile. ‘I’m Italian. I have Italian friends and associates across the country.’

Suspicion crawled across Ailsa’s scalp like a stick insect on stilts. ‘So... Do I have you to thank for the di Capellis’ villa in Florence? And the Ferrantes’ in Rome?’

‘Why shouldn’t I recommend you? Your work is superb.’

Ailsa narrowed her gaze. ‘Presumably, you mean as an interior decorator, not as a wife.’

‘Maybe you’ll be better at it the second time around.’

‘There isn’t going to be a second time around,’ Ailsa said. ‘You tricked me into marrying you the first time. Do you really think I’m so stupid I’d fall for it again?’

He leaned back in his leather chair with indolent grace, reminding her of a lion pausing before he pounced on his prey. ‘I didn’t say it would be a real marriage this time around.’

Ailsa wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or insulted. Could he have made it any more obvious he didn’t find her attractive any more? Sex was the only thing they were good at in the past. Better than good...brilliant. The chemistry they’d shared had been nothing short of electrifying. From their first kiss her body had sparked with incendiary sexual heat. She had never orgasmed with anyone but him. She hadn’t even enjoyed sex before him. And, even more telling, she hadn’t had sex since him. So why wouldn’t he want to cash in on the amazing chemistry they’d shared?

‘Not real...as in—?’

‘We won’t be sleeping together.’

‘We...we won’t?’ She was annoyed her voice sounded so tentative and uncertain. So...crushed.

‘We’ll be together in public for the sake of appearances. But we’ll have separate rooms in private.’

Ailsa couldn’t understand why she was feeling so hurt. She didn’t want to sleep with him. Well, maybe her traitorous body did, but her mind was dead set against it. Her body would have to get a grip and behave itself because there was no way she was going to dive back into bed with Vinn... She had a sneaking suspicion she might not want to get out of it.

‘Look, this is a pointless discussion because I’m not coming back to you in public or private or even in this century. Understood?’

He held her gaze with such quiet, steely intensity a shiver shimmied down her spine like rolling ice cubes. ‘Once the three months is up I will grant you a divorce without contest.’

Ailsa swallowed again. This was what she’d wanted—an uncomplicated straightforward divorce. He would give it to her if she agreed to a three month charade. ‘But if we’re seen to be living together it will cancel out the last two years of separation according to English divorce law.’

‘It will delay the divorce for another couple of years, but that would only be a problem if you’re intending to marry someone else.’ He waited a beat before adding, ‘Are you?’

Ailsa forced herself to hold his gaze. ‘That depends.’

‘On?’

‘On whether I find a man who’ll treat me as an equal instead of a brood mare.’

He rose from his chair with an expelled breath as if his patience had come to the end of its leash. ‘For God’s sake, Ailsa. I raised the topic back then as a discussion, not as an imperative. I felt it was something we should at least talk about.’

‘But you knew my opinion on having children when you asked me to marry you,’ Ailsa said. ‘You gave me the impression you were fine with not having a family. I wouldn’t have married you if I’d thought you were going to hanker after a bunch of kids before the ink was barely dry on our marriage certificate.’

His expression was storm cloud broody and lightning flashed in his eyes. ‘You have no idea of the word compromise, do you?’

Ailsa gave a mocking laugh. ‘That’s rich, coming from you. I didn’t hear any talk of you offering to stay home and bring up the babies while I worked. You assumed I would gladly kick off my shoes and pad barefoot around your kitchen with my belly protruding, didn’t you?’

His expression locked down into his trademark intractable manner. ‘I’ve never understood why someone from such a normal and loving family would be so against having one of her own.’

Normal? There was nothing normal about her background. On the surface, yes, her family life looked normal and loving. Even since their divorce both her mother and stepfather had tried hard to keep things reasonably civil, but it was all smoke and mirrors and closed cupboards because the truth was too awful, too shameful and too horrifying to name.

On one level Ailsa understood her mother and stepfather’s decision to keep the information about her mother’s rape by a friend of a friend—who’d turned out to be a complete stranger gate-crashing a party—a secret from her. Her mother had been traumatised enough by the event, so traumatised she hadn’t reported it to the police, nor had she told her boyfriend—Ailsa’s stepfather—until it was too late to do anything about the pregnancy that had resulted. Her stepfather had always been against having a DNA test but her mother had insisted on it, saying she needed to know. When Ailsa was fifteen she had come home earlier than normal from school to overhear her mother and stepfather arguing in their bedroom. She’d overheard many arguments between her parents before but this one had been different. Overhearing the awful truth about her origin meant that her life and all her dreams and hopes for her own family had died in that stomach-curdling moment.

Ailsa met Vinn’s flinty gaze. ‘In spite of my refusal to play this game of charades with you, I hope you will still sponsor Isaac. He looks up to you and would be devastated if you—’

‘That’s not how I do business.’

She raised her chin a little higher. ‘And I don’t respond to blackmail.’

His gaze warred with hers for endless seconds, like so many of their battles in the past. It was strange, but this was one of the things she’d missed most about him. He was never one to shy away from an argument and nor was she. She had always secretly enjoyed their verbal skirmishes because most, if not all, of their arguments had ended in bed-wrecking make-up sex. She wondered if he was thinking about that now—how passionate and explosive their sex life had been. Did he miss it as much as she did? Did he ever reach for her in the middle of the night and feel a hollow ache deep inside to find the other side of the bed empty?

No, because his bed was probably never empty.

Ailsa was determined not to be the first to look away even though, as every heart-chugging second passed, she could feel her courage failing. His dark brown eyes had a hard glaze of bitterness and two taut lines of grimness bracketed his mouth, as if, these days, he only rarely smiled.

The sound of his phone ringing on the desk broke the deadlock and Vinn turned to pick it up. ‘Nonno?’ The conversation was brief and in Italian but Ailsa didn’t need to be fluent to pick up the gist of it. She could see the host of emotions flickering across Vinn’s face and the way the tanned column of his throat moved up and down. He put down the phone and looked at her blankly for a moment as if he’d forgotten she was even there.

‘Is everything all right?’ Ailsa took a step towards him before she checked herself. ‘Is your grandfather—?’

‘A donor has become available.’ His voice sounded strangely hollow, as if it was coming through a vacuum. ‘I thought there would be more time to prepare. A week or two or something but... The surgery will be carried out within a matter of hours.’ He reached for his car keys on the desk and scooped up his jacket where it was hanging over the back of his office chair, his manner uncharacteristically flustered, distracted. In his haste to find his keys several papers slipped off the desk to the floor and he didn’t even stop to retrieve them. ‘I’m sorry to cut this meeting short but I’m going to see him now before—’ another convulsive swallow ‘—it’s too late.’

Ailsa had never seen Vinn so out of sorts. Nothing ever seemed to faze him. Even when she’d told him she was leaving two years ago, he’d been as emotionless as a robot. It intrigued her to see him feeling something. Was there actually a heart beating inside that impossibly broad chest? She bent down to pick up the scattered papers and, tidying them into a neat pile, silently handed them to him. He took them from her and tossed them on the desk, where a couple of pages fluttered back to the floor.

‘I can’t let him down,’ he said in a low mumble, as if talking to himself. ‘Not now. Not like this.’

‘Would you like me to go with you?’ The offer was out before Ailsa could stop it. ‘My flight doesn’t leave for a few hours so...’

His expression snapped out of its distracted mode and got straight back to cold, hard business. ‘If you come with me, you come as my wife. Deal or no deal.’

Ailsa was torn between wanting to tell him where to put his deal and wanting to see more of this vulnerable side of him. She could agree to the charade verbally but he could hardly hold her to anything without having her sign something.

‘I’ll go with you to the hospital because I’ve always liked your grandfather. That’s if you think he’d like to see me?’

‘He would like to see you,’ Vinn said and searched through the papers on his desk for something, muttering a curse word in the process.

‘Is this what you’re looking for?’ Ailsa handed him the pages that had fallen the second time.

He took them from her and, reaching for a pen, slid them in front of her on the desk. ‘Sign here.’

She ignored the pen and met his steely gaze. ‘Do we have to do it now? Your grandfather is—’

‘Sign it.’

Ailsa could feel her will preparing for battle. Her spine stiffened to concrete, her jaw set to stone and her gaze sent a round of fire at his. ‘I’m not signing it unless you give me time to read it.’

‘Damn it, Ailsa, there isn’t time,’ Vinn said, slamming his hand down on the desk. ‘I need to see my grandfather. Trust me, okay? Just for once in your life trust me. I can’t let Nonno down. I can’t fail him. He’s depending on me to get him through this. Along with Isaac’s sponsorship, I’ll pay you a lump sum of ten million.’

Ailsa’s eyebrows shot up so high she thought they might hit the light fitting above her head. ‘Ten...million?’

The line of his mouth was white-tight. ‘If you don’t sign in the next five seconds the deal is off. Permanently.’

Ailsa took the pen from him, his fingers brushing hers in the exchange, sending a riot of fiery sensations from her fingertips to her feminine core. The pen was still warm from where he’d been holding it. She remembered all too well his warmth. The way it lit the wick of her desire like a match on dry tinder. She could feel the smouldering of his touch moving through her body, awakening sensual memories.

Memories she had tried so hard to suppress.

She took a shaky breath and ran her gaze over the document. It was reasonably straightforward: three years of sponsorship for Isaac and giving her a lump sum of ten million on signing. While it annoyed her he’d used money as a lure, she realised it was the primary language he spoke. Money was his mother tongue, not Italian. Well, she could learn to speak Money too. Ten million was a lot of money. She was successful in her business but with ten million in her bank account she could expand her studio to Europe.

But then she realised how trapped she would be once she signed that agreement. She would have to spend three months with Vinn. She needed time to think about this. She had rushed into marriage with him in the past. How foolish would it be to rush into this without proper and careful consideration? She left the document unsigned and pushed it and the pen back to him. ‘I need a couple of days to think about this. It’s a lot of money and... I need more time.’

He showed no emotion on his face, which surprised her given how insistent he had been moments earlier. But maybe behind that masked expression he was already planning another tactic to force her to comply with his will. ‘We will discuss this further after we’ve been to the hospital.’ He put the paper under a paperweight and, picking up her overnight bag, ushered her out of his office.

He spoke a few quick words to his receptionist Claudia, explaining what was happening, and Claudia expressed her concern and assured him she would take care of everything back here at the office. Ailsa felt a twinge of jealousy at the way the young woman seemed to be such an integral part of the business. She wondered what had happened to the receptionist who had worked for him during their marriage. Vinn liked surrounding himself with beautiful women and they didn’t come more beautiful than Claudia, who looked as if she’d just stepped out of a photo shoot.

Ailsa waited until they were in Vinn’s car and on their way to the hospital before she brought up the subject. ‘What happened to your other receptionist, Rosa?’

‘I fired her.’

She rounded her eyes in surprise. She’d thought his relationship with the middle-aged Rosa had been excellent. She’d often heard him describe Rosa as the backbone of the business and how he would be lost without her. Why on earth would he have fired her? ‘Really? Why?’

He worked his way through the gears with an almost savage intensity. ‘She overstepped the mark. I fired her. End of story.’

‘Overstepped it in what way?’

He sent her a speaking glance. ‘Could we leave this until another time?’

Ailsa bit her lip. ‘I’m sorry... I know you’re feeling stressed and this must be so upsetting for you with your grandfather so desperately ill...’

There was a long silence.

‘He’s all I have,’ Vinn said in the same hollow-sounding voice he’d used back in his office. ‘I’m not ready to lose him.’

She wanted to reach for his hand or to put her hand on his thigh the way she used to do, but instead she kept to her side of the car. He probably wouldn’t welcome her comfort or he might push her away, which would be even worse. ‘You still have your dad, don’t you?’ she said.

‘No.’ He made another gear change. ‘He died. Car crash. He was driving under the influence and killed himself and his new girlfriend and seriously injured a couple and their two children travelling in the other car.’

‘I’m so sorry...’ Ailsa said. ‘I didn’t know that.’

It pained her to think Vinn had gone through such a tragic loss since she’d left and she’d known nothing about it. She hadn’t even sent a card or flowers. Had he kept his dad’s death out of the press? Not that she went looking for news about Vinn and his family...well, not unless she’d had one too many glasses of wine late at night when she was feeling particularly lonely and miserable.

He shrugged off her sympathy. ‘He was on a fast track to disaster from the moment my mother died when I was a child. Without her steadying influence he was a train wreck waiting to happen.’

Ailsa had rarely heard Vinn mention his mother’s death. It was something he never spoke of, even in passing. But she knew his relationship with his father had never truly recovered after his father was charged with fraud when Vinn was barely out of his teens. The shame on the family’s name and the reputation of the bespoke furniture business had been hard to come back from, but coming back from it had been Vinn’s blood, sweat and tears mission and he had done it, building the company into a global success.

‘I guess not everyone gets to have a father-of-the-year dad,’ she said, sighing as he turned into the entrance of the hospital. ‘Both of us lucked out on that one.’

Vinn had pulled into a parking spot and glanced at her again with a frown. ‘What do you mean? You’ve got a great dad. Michael’s one of the most decent, hardworking men I’ve ever met.’

Ailsa wanted to kick herself. She even lifted one foot to do it, welcoming the stab of pain from her high heel because she was a fool to let her guard slip. A damn fool.

‘Yes...yes, I know. He’s wonderful...even since the divorce he still makes an effort to—’

‘Then why say something like that? He’ll always be your dad even though he’s divorced from your mother.’

‘Forget I said it. I... I wasn’t thinking.’ Ailsa hated that she sounded so flustered and hoped he’d put it down to the emotion of seeing his grandfather under such tense and potentially tragic circumstances. She had a feeling if he hadn’t been in such a rush to see his grandfather before the surgery he might well have pushed her to explain herself a little more. It was a reprieve, but how long before he came back to it with his dog-with-a-bone determination?

It was a timely reminder she would have to be careful around Vinn. He knew her in a way few people did. Her knew her body like a maestro did an instrument. He knew her moods, her likes and dislikes, her tendency to use her sharp tongue as a weapon when she got cornered.

He didn’t know her shameful secret, but how soon before he made it his business to find out?