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‘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?’
CHAPTER TWO
‘NEVER!’ Jessica gasped breathlessly, searing his dark, savage visage with all the tortured fury of her ignominious and powerless position. ‘The very idea of you touching me again makes me feel physically sick!’
‘One lesson wasn’t enough for you, was it?’ Carlo murmured huskily, narrowed eyes raking over her outraged features. ‘Don’t you remember what it was like when I made love to you?’
‘That wasn’t love,’ Jessica vented fiercely. ‘That was lust!’
‘And you have a problem with that... I don’t,’ Carlo confided in a black velvet purr. And then, with a sardonic laugh, he released her when she was least expecting the gesture and thrust her carelessly back from him.
Jessica was trembling and in considerable distress. She had lost control. Physical and mental control. And that terrified her. Six years ago, she had been twenty, barely out of the teen years and considerably more naive and foolish than she considered herself to be now. The last few minutes were like a blackout inside her mind. She didn’t want to examine them. He had made her so angry she had become violent and that knowledge literally filled her with shame and horror.
Her body felt peculiar. Her heartbeat was still madly accelerated. Her breasts were suddenly extraordinarily sensitive. She was maddeningly aware that the lace cup of her bra was chafing her nipples and that her skin felt stretched and tight. Horrified by what had happened to her body, she studied the floor, fighting to relocate her composure.
‘Let’s get down to business,’ Carlo suggested drily. ‘We’ve wasted enough time.’
‘Business?’ Her brow furrowed.
‘I invited you here for one reason only. You could be of use to me. I need a woman to play a role. A woman I can trust to play that role to the best of her ability and do exactly as she’s told. And I think that that woman could be you—’
Her lashes fluttered in bemusement. ‘I don’t think I follow.’
‘If you are prepared to place yourself without question in my hands for a period, not exceeding three months, I will consider treating your father’s offence with sympathy, understanding and forgiveness...’ Carlo stated quietly.
