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At that candid reminder, and still painfully aware of his merciless scrutiny, Caroline folded down on to the sofa beside her. She felt stiff and achy, and her head felt far too heavy for her neck. But more than anything she resented his attitude. After all, over the past forty-eight hours he had single-handedly put her through hell.
She lifted her chin, misty grey eyes bright with condemnation. ‘That’s a shame, when it’s your fault I got drunk in the first place.’
‘How could it be my fault?’ Valente growled, standing over her to stare down at her with judgemental dark eyes.
Caroline forgot her dizziness and leapt up again, clutching at the sofa-arm to steady her swaying legs. It was very much a case of mind over matter. ‘You did this to me by threatening harm to everyone I care about and landing the responsibility for what happens to them on to my shoulders!’
‘And such puny shoulders they are. Who would want to depend on you? I did once, and where did it get me?’ Valente murmured lethally. ‘You can’t blame me for your weakness.’
Caroline was bone-white at having that particular flaw flung back in her face. ‘When did you turn into such a total bastard? You don’t care about anything or anybody as long as you get what you want.’
‘The chances of my getting what I want at this moment look exceedingly remote,’ Valente derided, averting his attention from the voluptuous appeal of her generous mouth and the lush swell of her round breasts. He cursed his powerful libido, and a body which had no conscience and no concept of self-protection, for he was already fiercely aroused. He crossed to the other side of the room to take up a position safely out of temptation’s way. ‘As far as I’m concerned, your state of intoxication makes you untouchable. Other men might be less choosy, but I’m not one of them.’
‘Nothing I’ve done equals what you’ve done,’ Caroline accused, holding herself rigid by the sofa in an effort to reclaim some dignity. It took even greater endeavour to think and vocalise, for her head was light and she felt as if the room was spinning round her again. Scarily, it was beginning to dawn on her that the full effects of the alcohol she had imbibed might not yet have hit her. ‘You hate me. Why won’t you let me explain what happened five years ago?’
‘It’s irrelevant after this length of time.’
‘But I never got the chance to speak to you again because you’d returned to Italy. You even changed your mobile phone number. I wrote to you, though. I poured my heart out on paper. You never replied to my letters,’ she reminded him painfully, thinking of the long weeks she had waited, praying for a reply, and the terrible silence that had underlined the fact that he was gone for ever.
‘I chucked them in the bin unread. There was no point reading them. Some errors of judgement cannot be explained away or forgiven,’ Valente pronounced with disdain, utilising a little white lie to conserve his privacy and to avoid having to deliberate over one very minor inexplicable aspect of his own behaviour.
‘You really do hate me, don’t you?’ she pressed, huge pale silvery eyes focussed on him with disturbing intensity.
‘I wouldn’t waste that much emotion on you, piccola mia. What was done was done five years ago. Now, I think it’s time for me to call my driver so that he can take you safely home,’ Valente delivered.
‘How can I go home when I don’t know what’s going to happen next?’ Caroline exclaimed.
Valente dealt her an incredulous appraisal. ‘If this was a trial view of what you might be like as a wife, you’ve bombed with spectacular effect.’
‘I wouldn’t want to marry you anyway!’ Caroline yelled at him, full volume. ‘I promised myself that I would never get married again because being tied to the wrong person is my definition of hell! Not to mention the fact that you’re sarcastic, cold and callous, manipulative, hypocritical, unscrupulous and sexually deviant!’
‘Sexually deviant?’ Valente launched back at her, only troubling to argue that one phrase of her outraged description of his character.
‘How else would a normal man describe summoning his former fiancée to a hotel like she’s a prostitute?’
‘Define “normal”,’ Valente invited. ‘I’d say I’m still in that class, but possibly a little more adventurous and imaginative than most. If you hadn’t wrecked it, it could have been a very sexy scenario.’
‘For someone with no morals!’ Caroline raged, finally into her stride and ignoring the horribly light-headed swirl she was in, and the fact that her view of Valente appeared to be coming and going and fogging over while her own voice had developed a horrible echo in her ears. ‘I don’t know how to do “very sexy”, or “deviant”, which is why I had to get drunk to come here. But I did it with the right intentions—to help other people.’
Valente was intrigued rather than repulsed by that feisty attack. He was also surprised to discover that the thought of teaching her how to do sexy and deviant in the bedroom had a tremendous appeal that had nothing at all to do with revenge, punishment or good business.
‘To help other people?’ he traded sardonically, unimpressed. ‘Why do you always play the victim? You came here tonight because you were set on saving your own little carcass from the threat of homelessness and poverty, because you would very much enjoy the status and luxury of being my wife, and because, much as you want to deny it with your martyr act, you want a good excuse to get into my bed.’
‘That’s absolutely a lie!’ Caroline snapped shrilly, taking a jerky, uncertain step forward—before crumpling down in a heap on to the carpet like a wind-up doll whose battery had suddenly gone flat.
For an instant Valente thought she was staging a bogus faint, like in the final shot of a melodrama, and he groaned out loud. But something about the stillness of her small shape drew him closer to examine her. He crouched down beside her inanimate body and tried to rouse her again. She had not tripped or struck her head, But when she failed to show any sign of life other than continuing to breathe, grudging concern coloured his cynicism. He rang Reception and asked for a doctor to be called. Offered first aid assistance, he gave a negative answer. If, as he suspected, alcohol was the cause of her collapse, the fewer people who knew about it the better. He picked her up, only to be troubled by how little her slight body weighed, and carried her into the bedroom. He studied her stillness, wondering if he should have called an ambulance instead, or even if he should just be bundling her into his limo to head to the local A&E himself.
The smudged mascara couldn’t hide the purple shadows below her eyes that accentuated her pallor, or the reality that, with the exception of breast and hip, she was exceedingly thin. It was barely five minutes before a doctor arrived at the door; by chance, the older man had been checking in at Reception when Valente had called down and, having overheard the conversation, had offered his services.
Dr Seaborne took one frowning look at his diminutive patient and asked what age she was. Valente was outraged at having to rifle through Caroline’s bag to provide proof of her age on her driving licence before the man was satisfied that he was not some predator with a preference for underage girls. In the midst of that interrogation her mobile phone began ringing. Valente switched it off.
Deeply unimpressed by his inebriated patient, the doctor checked Caroline over as best as he could, and said that he saw no point seeking further medical help simply because she had passed out.
Although severely ruffled by the treatment he had received for the sin of harbouring a very youthful-looking drunk in his hotel suite, Valente knew he could not possibly have her delivered home unconscious without being forced to make the sort of explanation he had no intention of making to her parents. Furious with her for landing him into such an untenable situation, he stripped off her dress and slotted her into the bed—but not before wincing at her unexciting white underwear topped by the sin of tights rather than the tantalising appeal of stockings...
Caroline had to break through layers of discomfort to battle into full wakefulness. Her head ached, her mouth was dry as a bone and her stomach felt distinctly sensitive. Pulling herself up against the pillows with a moan of self-pity, she opened her eyes on a totally unfamiliar room.
In a panic, she lurched out of bed, blinking in dismay as her head swam just a little—and she recoiled in horror when the bedroom door opened wider to frame Valente.
‘I heard you get up. I’ll order breakfast for you.’
In the act of trying to wrap herself in the duvet in a hurry, her face hot enough to fry eggs on, Caroline reeled back against the bed for support. ‘No, thanks,’ she said weakly, appalled to acknowledge that she had failed to go home the night before and that she remembered next to nothing about their meeting after being ill.
Exotically, wildly handsome, and extremely well-groomed in his black designer-cut suit and cerise silk shirt, Valente leant back against the doorjamb like a model straight out of a glossy magazine. ‘Eat. It’ll make you feel better, and possibly a couple of painkillers would help too.’
‘Why didn’t you take me home?’ Caroline gasped, looking anywhere but at him. And in the midst of that evasive activity she finally noticed that the pillow beside hers bore the imprint of a head. ‘My goodness … no—we slept together?’
‘The sofa was too small for me.’
Caroline settled aghast grey eyes on him. ‘Did we …? I mean …?’
Valente gave her a slicing look of derision. ‘Do I look so desperate for sex that I would make use of a comatose body?’
As he had no doubt intended, Caroline shrank again, and hugged the duvet all the tighter to her shivering figure. ‘So we didn’t, then. That’s good,’ she managed to say.
‘Quite.’ A slanting ebony brow lifted. ‘But don’t ever drink like that again.’
‘I won’t,’ she said tightly. ‘It was a hideous mistake, and I learn from my mistakes.’
‘Some men would have taken advantage of you in that condition. You were in no state to look after yourself and that’s dangerous,’ he framed harshly.
‘Right … okay … message more than received,’ Caroline countered, squirming with shame. ‘If it’s all right with you I’m going to take a shower.’
Valente waved a helpful hand in the right direction. ‘Breakfast will be waiting when you’re ready.’
After stooping to pick up the silver-blue dress from the floor, Caroline wore the duvet into the bathroom. Only then did she wonder what time it was, and take on board the reality that she had stayed out all night. Her watch let her know it was only eight o’clock, and she knew her parents were unlikely to get home until lunchtime at the earliest since her Uncle Charles was an elderly bachelor and a most gracious host. Thanking her lucky stars for that reality, Caroline shed the concealment of the duvet and stepped into the shower.
What a disaster she had been in the seduction stakes! How could she have been so foolish as to drink so much? If anything she had damaged her own cause irreparably, because now Valente was disgusted with her. So, once more, the virtue she no longer wanted had been conserved. A shiver of regret ran through her at the thought of how unattractive her behaviour must have been. It wasn’t that she particularly wanted to be attractive to Valente, she reasoned doggedly, only that that supposed attraction appeared to be the only bargaining chip she had.
Putting on the previous night’s clothes was not a pleasurable exercise either. She did the best she could with her hair, but the mirror warned her that too much alcohol had given her a pale, puffy face that looked both plain and tired. She reluctantly joined Valente in the dining annexe off the drawing room. He handed her painkillers and a glass of water first, and she took them without comment because she still felt awful. A large selection of food was on offer, and she nibbled modestly at a few items in the vague hope of settling her stomach. While she ate, and he drank copious amounts of black coffee, Valente described the doctor’s concerns of the evening before, and before very long she wanted once again to sink through the floor in shame.
‘Your phone was ringing last night. I switched it off,’ he told her finally.
Caroline hadn’t even checked her phone, and she fished it out of her bag and switched it on again. She frowned when she realised she had missed a whole heap of calls. Cold, clammy anxiety gripped her when she realised that her Uncle Charles and on two occasions her mother had made those calls, in an unsuccessful but clearly urgent attempt to get in touch with her.
‘What is it?’ Valente prompted.
Caroline was already frantically clicking on her uncle’s number.
The older man answered his phone quickly. ‘Caroline? Thank goodness I’ve finally got hold of you,’ he exclaimed, before telling her that her father had suffered what Charles referred to as ‘a funny turn’ the evening before, and had been taken into hospital. Her mother had accompanied her husband, and had already phoned Charles that morning to ask if he thought she ought to call the police because she couldn’t get hold of her daughter.
‘I’ll go straight to the hospital,’ Caroline stated, in a daze of disbelief and horror at what had been happening while she lay asleep.
‘Hospital?’ As she stood up, Valente closed a hand round her arm to still her. ‘What’s going on?’
Her eyes brimming with guilty tears of anxiety, Caroline explained in harried tones while dialling the number of the hospital which her uncle had given her. She wanted to ensure that her mother would receive a message of reassurance as soon as possible.
‘I’ll take you there right now,’ Valente declared, contacting his staff in turn to issue instructions. ‘Why would your mother have wanted to call the police, though? Do you never stay out overnight?’
‘Of course not. I didn’t worry about last night because I assumed they were safe at Charles’s house. I should have known better,’ she lamented, her conscience eating her alive because she had not been available to offer help and support when she was needed. ‘Now they’ll know I didn’t come home, and they’ll be terribly shocked and upset by that. Who am I supposed to say I was with? If I admit it was you, it’ll be like Armageddon.’
‘You’re an adult, not a child, piccola mia. An explanation shouldn’t be necessary. You were married for several years.’ Brilliant dark eyes assailed her and her tummy somersaulted in response. ‘I can hardly believe that you are still allowing your parents to rule you to this extent.’
‘It’s not like that!’ Caroline proclaimed angrily. ‘I rarely go out at night, and they know I don’t have a boyfriend, so of course they would worry when they discovered that I wasn’t at home in the middle of the night. Unlike you, I lead a very quiet life. Why on earth did you switch off my phone?’
‘The doctor I had summoned to attend to you was waiting to speak to me, and you were in no fit state to deal with a phone call.’
His argument was unanswerable.
Caroline hung her head. ‘I feel so cheap, walking out of a hotel dressed in last night’s clothes. Everybody will know I’ve had a one-night stand.’
‘I should be so lucky,’ Valente quipped, soft and low. ‘The minute we got together it was guaranteed to go wrong. There could not be two more different people on this planet than you and I.’
In the grand foyer on the ground floor, Caroline tried to behave like the invisible woman for the benefit of any interested parties who might choose to regard her as a slut for being seen wearing a cocktail dress at breakfast time. Valente, however, closed a hand over hers and urged her into the hotel boutique.
‘I called ahead,’ he breathed as a saleswoman approached them with a smile.
‘Mr Lorenzatto? I believe we have exactly what you’re looking for.’
With a smile, she extended a dressy sapphire-blue raincoat for Caroline to try on.
Caroline was duly inserted into the coat and the sash pulled tight at her waist. ‘Perfect,’ Valente pronounced, flexing a gold credit card before urging her back into the foyer again.
‘I’ll have to pay you for this,’ Caroline muttered uncomfortably, but she was relieved to have the means of concealing a dress that would have looked highly suspicious to her mother.
‘You don’t ever pay,’ Valente riposted. ‘That’s the main advantage of being the mistress of a very rich man.’
‘I didn’t know I was still in the running,’ Caroline said breathlessly, suddenly aware that his staff and security team were all waiting beside the fleet of cars parked at the front of the hotel, and eying her with intense curiosity. She blushed to the roots of her hair.
Valente noted that every man in their radius was unashamedly staring at the little figure by his side. Even when she made no effort to attract masculine attention she oozed femininity, cuteness and sex appeal from every pore. He clenched his even white teeth hard. Just minutes earlier he had been thinking that enough was enough, and he didn’t want to be involved in the complexities of any form of relationship with Caroline. But the thought of leaving her free, if poor, to be scooped up by some other man had zero attraction for him.
He turned smouldering dark golden eyes on her again. ‘But you want to stay in the running, don’t you?’
Her lashes swept up on her bright eyes and she nodded very slowly in agreement, although she couldn’t quite believe what she was doing.
‘So,’ Valente breathed huskily, ‘you believe that you can do better than last night?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Caroline told him blithely, refusing to give way to her usual sense of failure and low expectation.
His own expectations on a stimulating sexual high, Valente smiled wolfishly down at her for the first time since that unforgotten solitary vigil at the church.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘YOU don’t need to come in with me,’ Caroline told Valente as the limousine drew up outside the hospital.
Valente simply ignored the statement.
Almost running to keep up with his long stride, Caroline made a second attempt to deter him before they reached Reception. ‘You must have loads of more important things to do,’ she said breathlessly.
Valente discovered on which ward her father was from a receptionist, who gave him the kind of starstruck treatment a famous celebrity might have received for an unannounced visit. At a trot, to match his groundbreaking progress through the busy corridors, Caroline clutched at his jacket-sleeve to bring him to a halt. ‘You can’t let Mum and Dad see you. You can’t let them know I was with you last night.’
He gave her anxious face a long, steady scrutiny. ‘Are you a child or an adult?’
‘This is not about me or you—it’s about my father’s health. He mustn’t have any shocks or upsets right now. He’s on a waiting list for heart surgery,’ she explained in an urgent undertone.
‘I would still like to speak to your parents …’
‘You’re the guy who owns their business and is about to chuck them out of their home,’ she reminded him bluntly. ‘Why would they want to see you when they’re already worried sick about Dad’s health?’
Finally, Valente agreed to wait round the corner from the side ward where she was directed to find her father. From there, however, once the curtains round the bed were partially drawn back, he had a perfect view of Joe Hales. The older man’s face was an unhealthy colour, his rasping breathing audible even from where Valente stood. Joe was wired up to a monitor; his wife was seated by his side. Valente was shocked by how much Caroline’s parents had aged since he had last seen them. Isabel had shrunk in stature even more.
But as Caroline’s mother broke into urgent speech, Valente soon appreciated that she might have become thinner, and her back more bent with her advancing years, but her abrasive controlling personality had not mellowed at all.
‘Where were you last night?’ Isabel demanded accusingly. ‘We’ve been worried sick about you.’
‘Now, now …’ Joe Hales interposed, striving to give his daughter a reassuring smile from blue-tinged lips as Caroline squeezed his hand affectionately. ‘We don’t want her sitting home every night at her age.’
‘I had a meeting with Valente,’ Caroline responded, striving to stick to the truth as far as she could. ‘I knew you were staying with Uncle Charles and I switched my phone off. I’m so sorry you weren’t able to get in touch with me.’
‘You went behind our backs to see that Italian?’ her mother hissed, in a tone of furious disbelief.
‘But you knew that I was seeing Valente yesterday morning,’ Caroline pointed out in a quiet, defensive tone, aimed at reminding Isabel that raised voices could be clearly heard through the rest of the ward. ‘How are you feeling, Dad?’
‘Tired, that’s all. Your mother’s been a tower of strength,’ Joe declared, endeavouring to calm his wife down with a change of topic.
‘We can’t just let this go. It’s a matter of decency,’ Isabel pronounced truculently. ‘I refuse to have any conversation with you at all, Caro, until you tell us why you didn’t come home last night.’
A pulsing silence fell while Caroline attempted to come up with a convincing story. Could she pretend that she had been at Winterwood all along and simply hadn’t heard the phone ringing? Shouldn’t she be adult enough to stand her ground and insist on her right to some privacy? It was not the time or the place. The look in her mother’s cold blue eyes cut like glass through Caroline’s frantic guilty thoughts, panicking her, making her feel like the worst daughter in the world, while once again making her painfully aware that she would never know happiness until she had garnered the strength to stand her ground against such domination. The ensuing awful silence, which she did not know how to fill, cut at her nerves like a slashing whip.
Valente brushed back the curtains and took up position by her side, greeting her parents with a cool and calm that knocked Caroline sideways before saying, ‘Last night I wouldn’t let Caroline go back to an empty house. Winterwood is remote, with your nearest neighbour living a considerable distance away. In your absence, I thought it made more sense for Caroline to spend the night at the hotel.’
Her eyes fiery, Isabel Hales opened her mouth to speak and closed it again only when her husband leapt thankfully on that explanation, which fitted in beautifully with his old-fashioned outlook. He found it perfectly acceptable that Valente should be protective towards his daughter. ‘That was the best idea in the circumstances. No harm done,’ Joe pronounced with relief, his eyes sliding shut, as if he was struggling to stay awake, and then slowly opening again.
‘Of course Caroline protested,’ Valente quipped.
‘Y-yes,’ Caroline stammered, overpowered by his intervention and his ready wits. ‘Dad, you look like you need to get some sleep.’
‘Let me offer you a lift home.’ Valente addressed Isabel Hales. ‘You must be exhausted if you’ve been here all night.’
