A Savage Betrayal

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Her lower lip dropped from her upper. ‘A quarter of a million, and you think I’d be living here like a rat in a cage?’

‘It would have been very foolish of you to flaunt it, but this…’ Cesare spread fastidious brown fingers as he took another almost fascinated glance around. ‘This dump is decided overkill. Your salary at Earth Concern might have been low, but it would certainly have enabled you to live more comfortably than this,’ he informed her drily.

‘Maybe I have expenses you don’t know about.’ As soon as she said it she regretted it, her profile pinching tight with tension. ‘A quarter of a million,’ she muttered in a hurried aside, very tempted to laugh like a hyena as she imagined how different the last few years would have been had she had access to even a tithe of that amount of money.

‘What did you do with it?’ Cesare enquired grimly.

‘I never had it, for goodness’ sake,’ Mina retorted wearily, suddenly totally fed up with the thankless task of reiterating her innocence to someone determined not to listen to her.

‘You deposited fifty thousand in your current account—what did you do with the rest of it?’

Fifty thousand. Alarm bells went off like Klaxons inside her head. A month after Mina had been sacked she had been stunned to receive a bank statement which informed her that she was miraculously fifty thousand pounds richer than she had thought she was. She had immediately contacted the bank to tell them that there had been a mistake and that the money they had credited to her account could not be hers. Incredibly they hadn’t been interested and had indeed assured her that there had been no mistake.

For a couple of days she had actually wondered if Cesare had deposited the money as a pay-off to salve his own conscience for the brutal way he had treated her. But that explanation had struck her as unlikely. In all, it had taken her quite a few weeks to persuade the bank that they had to take that money back out of her account. Finally they had done so and a while after that, when she had asked, a bank clerk had gone off to enquire and returned to tell her that yes, there had been a mistake and the money had since been returned to its true owner.

‘How did you know what was in my account?’ Mina probed.

‘I have my methods. Now perhaps you’ll cease this painful refusal to admit the truth,’ Cesare suggested.

Mina burned with bitterness. It was too much of a coincidence. She had been smoothly set up as a fall guy. Cesare had been able to trace some of the money right back to her. Somebody had laid a careful trail for him, but who? And how could she ever find out and prove her own innocence? Surely the bank had a record of that transfer of the fifty thousand into another account? Well, she wasn’t about to waste her breath sharing her suspicions with Cesare, who would doubtless think that in fear of investigation she had transferred the money elsewhere in a belated attempt to cover her own tracks.

‘You’ve only been with that charity for two years,’ Cesare persisted. ‘Where were you for the other two years? Travelling? Partying?’

It had been no blasted party in that labour ward, Mina thought in sudden rage; nor had the second year been any more entertaining. Ignoring family protests, she had been determined to go it alone with Susie. She had worked in a series of lousy jobs, most often brought to an end by an inability to find a reliable child-minder whom she could afford to pay.

In fact she had practically starved before she’d accepted that she could either fall back on the social services, who would then have sought child support for Susie from Cesare, or go back to Roger and Winona with her tail between her legs. Of the two options, family had won out. Mina would sooner have slept on a park bench than have Cesare know that she had given birth to his child. A man who slept with you one night and sacked you the next was hardly keen father material. Cesare had made his indifference cruelly clear. He had treated her like the dirt beneath his feet and she would never, ever forget that experience.

‘Partying,’ Cesare decided, searching her flushed and defensive face.

Mina threw back her head, provoked beyond tolerance. ‘Why not?’

‘Who with?’ Cesare grated roughly.

Mina shrugged, moving a few feet to the small window, bitterly amused by his anger. Fool that she was, she hadn’t seen this weakness in Cesare last night. He still wanted her; he still found her attractive. Why was she so shattered by that revelation? Sexual chemistry did not automatically go hand in glove with respect and liking. Hadn’t she learnt that to her own cost last night? She hated him but he could still smash her defences just by touching her, just by coming too close, awakening her with the flaring gold of his beautiful eyes. Cesare was a very sexual personality. So why shouldn’t he be vulnerable too? It was poetic justice.

‘I asked you who with?’ he repeated curtly.

‘Far be it from me to ask what business that is of yours!’ Mina spun round and her eyes clashed with the glittering gold threat in his.

‘I want to know, and I also want to know where you go at weekends,’ he spelt out between clenched teeth.

‘Do I get to ask what you’ve been doing with your weekends for the past four years?’ Mina suddenly heard herself spit back at him, and she didn’t even know where that question had come from, didn’t recall thinking it. But all of a sudden she knew she hated Cesare even more than she had thought.

‘I asked you first. How many men have you been with?’

‘How many women have you been with?’ she launched back furiously.

Cesare snatched in an audible breath and strode forward. ‘The weekends. Who is he?’

Mina reflected on the considerable amount of time she spent with Roger’s grandfather, whom she had known since she was three years old. Baxter Keating was a lovely old man, who shared his large country house with Roger and Winona and was as careful as Mina was not to intrude any more than necessary on the couple’s privacy.

‘He’s a lot older than you,’ she murmured with vicious sweetness, wanting to shock, wanting to anger.

Cesare went rigid, satisfyingly so. ‘Married?’

‘Widowed.’

‘Is he likely to marry you?’ he bit out.

‘No,’ she said with perfect truth.

‘But you go down to his home at weekends…and you live with him,’ Cesare framed in a thunderous, raw undertone that sent tiny little tremors running up her taut spinal column. A confession that she spent her weekends at orgies could not have drawn a more appalled response.

‘If you didn’t want the truth, you shouldn’t have asked,’ Mina dared, priding herself on not having told a single lie. And, since what she had pretended to confess would naturally be a total turn-off for a man as fastidious as Cesare, hopefully he would now leave her alone.

With a nerve-racking abruptness that made her flinch, he swung away from her and then disconcertingly swung back, his strong face set like stone. ‘Presumably he bought the clothes you were wearing last night?’

‘Yes.’ Roger worked for his grandfather, managing the family estate. Roger financed Winona’s wardrobe.

‘Clearly you have spent all the money.’

‘I have a small overdraft.’ Gosh, this dialogue was fun, she thought nastily, enjoying the feeling that she had Cesare on the run.

His eloquent mouth was flattened into a bloodless line but there was an arc of darker colour highlighting his savage cheekbones and the stark clarity of his gaze. ‘Without shame, you admit to me that you are——’

‘Morally weak.’

‘The activities you confess to are not one step removed from prostitution,’ Cesare condemned with the oddest tremor interfering with his usually perfect diction.

Mina lost colour but held fast. He was absolutely disgusted. Another few minutes and he would be gone, put to flight by her moral depravity.

‘Haland?’ he enunciated.

Mina reddened fiercely. ‘No!’

‘Madre di Dio…God has some mercy…’ Cesare expelled his breath and surveyed her with fiercely narrowed eyes. ‘You will not communicate in any way with this man again,’ he told her with menacing harshness. ‘Nor will you ever offend me again by referring to the liaison.’

Events had taken a sudden violently off-balancing swerve into unknown and unexpected territory. Mina blinked rapidly. ‘I——’

‘Not another word,’ Cesare cut in rawly. ‘Dio! How the hell could you tell me such truth? Could you not have lied?’ He spat something in angry Italian, slashed a furious hand through the air, making her jump back a step, and then appeared to get a grip on his rage again. ‘No, it is better that I know the truth.’

‘I think you should go now.’ Mina was keen to give him a helping hand back in the direction of the exit she had been expecting him to make.

‘Why?’ Cesare slung her a derisive look of smouldering aggression. ‘When you’ve just given me the price——’

Without understanding, she frowned. ‘What price?’

‘You’re the one who has told me that you are any man’s possession for the right price, and I’m prepared to pay it to have you in my bed,’ Cesare drawled with a positive shudder of unconcealed fury.

Sharply disconcerted by the even less anticipated response he was now making, Mina licked her dry lips. ‘I——’

‘You told me quite deliberately, you shameless…’ With a seething hiss, Cesare clenched his even white teeth and bit back whatever he had been about to call her. ‘You know how much I want you. You just stuck on a pricetag!’

Mina almost choked in an effort to swallow. Cesare had withstood that farrago of gruesome lies about her lover in the country? He might be within a death-defying inch of reaching out and choking the life out of her for her apparent promiscuity and greed but, on the brink of murder or otherwise, he was ready to embark upon financial negotiation for her sexual favours.

Mina had never been more appalled or more shattered. It was not a compliment, but Cesare wanted her that much? He had been so cool, so controlled last night. This afternoon he was neither. She had never seen him out of control before. Involuntarily she was fascinated by the play of vibrant, strong emotions across his rawly handsome features. He was fighting a very close fight between a desire to kill her and a desire to—oh!

A flush of heat prickling across her skin, every muscle tightening, Mina dredged her attention from the explicit sexuality of the all-male gaze roaming hotly over her.

‘I don’t think I’m really your type,’ she muttered weakly, beginning to wonder if she belonged in an asylum.

‘Someday, somehow, perhaps when I have sated this obscene craving for your body, I will take this out on your hide,’ Cesare swore, like someone making a blood oath over a grave. ‘I will punish you for this filthy negotiation that reduces me to the level of an animal!’

Dry-mouthed on the feeling that she had foolishly unleashed a whole lot more than she could handle in that brooding Sicilian temperament, Mina backed to the window, still refusing to look at him, not trusting herself, not trusting him, feeling with every fibre of her body the passion flaming reckless fingers of fire into the atmosphere between them. ‘Cesare…I didn’t mean to——’

‘To think I could have saved myself from this,’ he grated. ‘The first day when you walked into that interview I decided I could not possibly employ a woman whom I wanted to strip and fling onto the nearest bed!’

Helplessly her head flew up. She couldn’t believe her ears.

‘I gave you a nightmare interview…and you took it,’ Cesare condemned with lingering disbelief at such unfeminine strength of will and staying power.

‘You were trying to scare me off?’ Mina questioned in a tone of revelation.

‘I was a fool. I gave you the job.’

Mina’s mouth curved downwards. He had been lusting after her from the start but he hadn’t shown it. He had played a waiting game, doubtless entertaining himself with the prospect of her willing and grateful surrender at the end of his little game. Wham-bam, but not thank you, ma’am.

She had been as naïve as a lamb skipping into the slaughterhouse and she was exceedingly tempted to demand to know why he hadn’t taken precautions. Considering that she had dissolved into mindless joy at his first kiss and he had been the experienced partner, she was still astounded by his reckless disregard for the consequences. Only then did it occur to her, for the very first time, that where Susie was concerned she had absolutely no regrets about that night. She could not imagine life without her daughter.

‘But now, at least, I know the kind of woman I am dealing with!’ Cesare asserted with driven savagery.

Dragged back to the present, she discovered that Cesare was now so close that she could feel the heat of him. Her spine was already in contact with the window behind her. ‘You know nothing about me!’ she protested shakily.

‘You excite me—what else is important?’ he said thickly, regarding her with sizzling intensity from the vantage point of his greatly superior height.

Her breasts were stirring, swelling. A heady languor was sweeping through her limbs, a betraying twist of high-voltage sexual awareness curling low in the pit of her stomach. But she fought every treacherous sensation with all her might, wild colour burnishing her openly dismayed face. ‘You don’t even like me…you called me a thief and a confidence trickster!’ she gasped. ‘How can you still——?’