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‘This is your room,’ he announced, closing the door in Koko’s face before the cat could cross the threshold, making it clear that there were boundaries to his tolerance. The large bedroom was furnished with polished antiques and ornamented with splendid flower arrangements. He pressed open doors, showing her the en-suite bathroom and then a dressing room before opening a third and final door. ‘This is my room. I like my own space, piccola mia.’
Frozen in the middle of the room, Caroline felt more rejected than comforted by that information. It reminded her that he had not wanted to marry her, that she had forced that issue, and that presumably he carried a certain amount of resentment over that fact. It was a suspicion that could only made her shiver. She did not want to go to bed with a man in a bad mood.
A knock sounded on the door and Valente opened it. Umberto entered with champagne and deftly poured the golden liquid into a pair of flutes, while the funereal silence rubbed Caroline’s nerves even rawer than they already were.
‘Not for me,’ she breathed when Valente extended her glass, for she was afraid that in the over-hyped state she was in the alcohol might make her sick.
Valente took only a sip from his own flute before drawing her to him with slow, steady hands and a dark glow of warmth in his gaze that made her tummy flip. ‘Now, show me how to enjoy being married,’ he urged.
It was an invitation that not unnaturally deprived her of speech—and then the force of her feverish tension blew a hole in her armour. ‘I’m going to disappoint you,’ she told him abruptly.
‘That would be impossible,’ Valente contradicted instantly in his dark accented drawl, sliding her jacket off her shoulders so smoothly that she didn’t know it was gone until he set it aside. He turned her round as though she was indeed that doll he had compared her to earlier, and ran down the zip on her dress. He pressed his lips to a slight smooth shoulder and the dress fell.
Caroline stepped out of it, terrifyingly aware of how sexually inviting she had to look in the scanty lingerie he had given her. She heard him expel his breath on a slow hiss of appreciation. ‘You look fantastic.’
‘Just like a fantasy?’ she pressed unevenly.
One lean hand closing over her limp fingers, he spun her round, smouldering black-lashed golden eyes wandering from the pert tilt of her breasts encased in ivory satin to the lace stockings that encased her long slender legs. ‘Si… I can hardly believe that I finally have you here with me, belezza mia.’
He brought his wide, sensual mouth hungrily down on hers. He played with her pouting lower lip and let his tongue dart skilfully beyond. He tasted her with slow deep hunger and she quivered, afraid of his passion and his strength but fighting the fear with all her might. He caught her up unexpectedly in his arms and carried her over to the big bed. Her imagination immediately leapt ahead to the mortification of nakedness awaiting her, the pain and the resentment.
Valente settled shrewd dark eyes on her. Her rigid position on the bed made him think of a doe looking down a double-barrelled shotgun, and he frowned at that illogical image. But there was no denying that Caroline’s behaviour never quite added up in the way he expected. ESP was still sending him messages he could not interpret. She had wanted this marriage, had fought for it. Yet, for a gold-digger, she had put up a very poor fight before she signed the pre-nuptial agreement without protesting a single clause. His lawyers had been ecstatic, and had assured him that his wealth was ring-fenced for eternity as far as she was concerned. Money evidently wasn’t what turned her on most. But if it was social status he now had plenty of that as well, so what was wrong with her?
She was shy, she had always been shy, and she was a little nervous, he reasoned while he shed his jacket, tie and shoes. A woman who had been married for almost four years shouldn’t be that nervous, though, should she?
Caroline fought to keep her breathing even. She was so worked up she wanted to gasp. But she was going to lie back and think of England, as no doubt countless women had over the centuries. Enjoyment wasn’t even on the cards. But it was going to work with him, it was going to work, she told herself over and over again. She took off her shoes and scrambled below the linen sheet while wondering what he would say if she asked him to turn the lights out. Then she finally looked at him as he was ditching his silk boxers and gulped, shocked by the awesome size of his erection, thinking that no, no way would she be able to give him what he wanted.
She was as pale as marble and as still, Valente reflected, dark brows pleated in bewilderment. Willing? Unwilling? Odd how it had never occurred to him that she might genuinely not want him. Was he so vain that he had refused even to acknowledge that possibility? But he had felt the buzz between them again, just as he had five years earlier, the unmistakable reciprocal pulse of sexual desire. Reassured by that conviction, Valente lowered himself down on the bed beside her, six foot plus of daunting masculinity and potency. He let his lean sun-bronzed body lightly connect with hers while he kissed her. And she liked the kiss, in fact she loved the kiss, and a little sound of pleasure escaped her. But then she felt the pulse of his arousal against her thigh, and the loosening of her bra as he released the fastening. It was too much too soon, and panic threatened to take her over.
Matthew’s taunts flooded her mind, and she cringed as a lean hand closed over one tiny mound and a thumb massaged the delicate bud of her nipple. A sort of tingling sensation ran through her, like a sting, and she froze, instinct taking over as she steeled herself for at best discomfort and at worst pain.
‘Your breasts are so beautiful, belezza mia,’ Valente breathed huskily, admiring the porcelain-fine skin of the pouting flesh and the nipple as delicate as a pale pink flower. He lowered his arrogant dark head to explore that sweet flesh with his mouth.
Caroline could not stop herself from raising her hands to push at his shoulders, wide fearful eyes pinned to him. ‘Please don’t….’
Astonishment stilled Valente in his tracks. ‘You don’t like that? Bene … it’s not a problem.’
Caroline shut her eyes tight and dragged in a sustaining breath. Of course it was a problem—everything she was feeling was a problem! His hand was on her thigh and she went rigid, a cold chill spreading through her lower limbs from deep inside her. He wasn’t hurting her, he wasn’t hurting her, she reminded herself fiercely, fighting her apprehension with every atom of her strength, but still she trembled.
In the lamplight, Valente studied her in ferocious confusion. Not only was she pale as marble, she was as unresponsive. He could feel the clamminess of her skin, her mental withdrawal. He had never met with such a reaction from a woman before, and her obvious distress pierced his ego like a knife plunging into his gut. ‘What’s wrong?’ he demanded grittily. ‘Where are you in all this? This is our wedding night, but you’re making me feel like a rapist.’
Her feathery lashes lifted. ‘I’m sorry … I’m just nervous.’
She didn’t want him. She didn’t want him. Valente looked into the misty depths of her grey eyes and willed her to prove otherwise, but neither encouragement nor even recognition energised her blank defensive expression. She didn’t want him. He didn’t want to accept that possibility. He lifted one hand and buried it in the tumble of her silvery blonde hair, cupping her small head with the span of his hand, holding her steady as he brought his sensual mouth back down on hers with all the demanding hunger he had until that moment controlled.
Taking fright at that forcefulness, and feeling trapped, Caroline reacted instinctively, tearing free of him and throwing herself backwards across the bed to slither down onto the floor. She braced her hands on the mattress for an instant before she straightened, because she was dizzy with stress and fear. ‘I can’t …. I just can’t do this with you!’
His darkly handsome features stamped with stunned disbelief, Valente thrust back the bedding and sprang upright. Hugging herself tight with defensive arms, Caroline watched him pull on his boxers. The raw tension in his handsome, dark profile and broad, bronzed shoulders was powerfully apparent to her assessing, anxious gaze. Once again she had upset and hurt him. She felt as if she was bleeding inside and she hated herself.
Valente swung round to settle shimmering golden eyes on her like metal grappling hooks. ‘What the hell is going on here? You wanted me to marry you—’
‘I know … I know. I’m sorry—’
‘Sorry doesn’t cut it in this scenario,’ Valente incised. ‘I want an explanation.’
Her troubled eyes strayed down over his lean, powerful physique and veered away when she realised that the silk boxers could not conceal the bold bulge of his arousal. Guilt assailed her in a choking tide. ‘I told you I was no good at sex …’
‘What just happened in that bed was about more than you not being good at sex,’ Valente flung back at her in condemnation. ‘You turned into a marble statue in my arms, and then you fought free of my arms as if you were being assaulted!’
‘I thought it might be different with you. I’m so sorry.’ Caroline was fighting the buckets of overwrought tears penned up behind her eyes, determined not to stoop to that very feminine plea for sympathy. ‘I couldn’t bear it.’
That last phrase was all Valente absorbed: I couldn’t bear it. ‘It’ being his touch and proximity. Dark blood settled over his stunning cheekbones and a shudder rippled through his big body, and coiling his masculine hands into powerful fists.
‘Then why did you marry me?’ he demanded rawly.
Feeling all the more naked and foolish, standing there in front of him with her arms crossed in a protective screen over her breasts, Caroline said, ‘I want to get dressed and then we can … talk.’
‘Maledizione … you will talk now,’ Valente delivered with emphatic force. ‘I have listened to enough nonsense.’
Caroline took him by surprise and backed into the bathroom to her right, slamming shut the door and ramming home the bolt to lock it with trembling urgency. That achieved, she stripped off what remained of the fancy lingerie with frantic hands. She hated those fanciful undergarments which could only remind her of her inadequacies in the seduction field.
‘I’m out of patience. If you don’t come out, I’ll kick the door down,’ Valente warned her dangerously from the other side of the door.
Caroline grabbed the flamboyant turquoise silk robe that hung on the back of the door and put it on. It had been made for someone a good deal taller and carried the exotic scent of another woman’s perfume. Of course he had had other lovers—probably hundreds of them, she thought wildly, and every one of them would have given him more pleasure than she ever could. As the door was struck with savage force she looked desperately round the tiled room for some means of escape, but she was stuck. The bolt broke away from the wood on the second blow and the door swung wide.
Valente focused on her standing there, as straight and defiant as an early Christian martyr while wrapped in his former mistress’s robe. As a picture it was all wrong. Housekeeping, he acknowledged, had fallen down in not removing that garment. It was not a moment when he wanted to be reminded of Agnese’s voluptuous sensuality in the bedroom. Agnese, who hadn’t been able to get enough of him between the sheets. Agnese, who had begged him to keep her on even after his marriage and who had dared to suggest that no wife could replace her. And just this once, Agnese, whose beauty and vanity were legendary, had been proved right.
‘How dare you do that to me.?’ Caroline protested, trembling like a leaf after that demonstration of male aggression. She felt helpless, threatened, for she did not know how to defuse his anger.
‘How dare you pose there, shaking like I’m about to physically hurt you?’ Valente raked back at her, closing a firm hand round her wrist and urging her back into the bedroom. ‘I’m entitled to an explanation from you. Feeling like you obviously do about me, why did you insist on marrying me?’
It was the question she had most dreaded, for she could not defend herself on that score. ‘I couldn’t have cut it as a mistress,’ she pointed out heavily, half under her breath. ‘You wouldn’t have helped my parents or Hales after an experience like this. So it had to be marriage. That’s your fault. You offered me so much to be with you that you made it impossible for me to refuse.’
Outraged condemnation had fired his beautiful eyes to a golden heat that threatened to burn her tender skin. ‘Yet right from the beginning you knew that the only thing I wanted from you was sex. So you deliberately set out to rip me off.’
Caroline tore her guilty gaze from him and studied the carpet. ‘There wasn’t a choice. But I did hope it would work out between us.’
‘Even though you recoiled from me in disgust the first time we kissed again?’ he bit out rawly.
Caroline paled. ‘That’s not what I felt.’
‘How could you possibly have hoped it would work out? I was so hot for you I was blind to all the signals that something was wrong and you knew it. You kept your distance and played me right up to the doors of the church. You’re a liar and a fraud!’
Every word cut into her like a knife, reminding her of failings that she was already all too well aware of. ‘Yes, in that field I was … but I did try to tell you the truth about me at the beginning,’ she reminded him painfully, the intimate conversation tearing off entire layers off her protective skin. Now that he knew her secret, she felt horribly exposed. ‘I’m frigid. It’s my problem, nothing to do with you.’
‘Dannazione! How can it be nothing to do with me? You promised to give me a child. What hope have we now of achieving that ambition?’
Caroline was pale as milk. ‘None, I suppose.’
‘You cheated me, and I don’t allow anyone who does that to walk away unscathed. You may be my wife, but for how much longer?’ Valente slung that question at her with icy derision. ‘You left one salient fact out of your financial calculations. If this marriage isn’t consummated I can have it set aside and it will be as if we were never married. I’ll be free of you and you will no longer be entitled to a settlement of any kind.’
With that final contemptuous speech Valente snatched up the clothing he had discarded, strode into the adjoining bedroom and closed the door firmly in his wake.
What shook Caroline at that instant was that she had to stop herself from running after him. What shook her even more was the intense emotional pain of his rejection. He hated her. He couldn’t wait to get rid of her. It was as if the roof had fallen in above her and the floor beneath her feet had vanished, so that she was still falling, falling, falling, in a never-ending downward spiral. The only thing I wanted from you was sex. And it was the one thing she couldn’t give him.
The veil between her plotting and her secret desires had been torn apart by their confrontation. Had she wed him for her family’s sake? To save the workers at Hales from the dole queue? Or because she had dreamt of turning the clock back five years and magically reclaiming the love she had once lost? Wasn’t it true that what she had really wanted more than anything else was a second chance with Valente? But history was history, and couldn’t be eradicated any more than she could get over her sexual dysfunction just because she wanted to. In despair, she sobbed into the pillow.
Even though it was late, Valente wanted to phone his legal team and put them to work on ridding him of his brand-new wife. Having switched off his emotions, he was in business mode, and keen to take action on what he viewed as an act of fraud committed against him. But the prospect of telling anyone alive that his bride had just refused him froze him into rare inactivity. Dressed, he strode downstairs, startling the staff still engaged on cleaning the dining room. He poured a drink in the drawing room and strode out on to the loggia.
I thought it might be different with you. Her words fluttered back to haunt his disarranged thoughts. It had been that bad with Matthew, as well? Valente’s rage began to abate at that awareness. She didn’t like sex, and whose fault was that? It was a fault that could only be laid at Matthew Bailey’s door. Pacing the loggia, while Umberto lit candles on the stone tables and sent his employer concerned glances, Valente pieced back together everything he knew about his bride.
Five years back she had been shy, innocent and inhibited, but she had never shown the slightest hint of fear when he touched her. There had been nothing abnormal about her reactions. Could he have been mistaken about the response she had recently given him when he kissed her? Was she repelled by him personally? Or simply repelled by sex? And what did the fear and her flight into the bathroom to shelter behind a locked door suggest? A fear that he might not take no for an answer? The lean strong bones of his face clenched hard on that suspicion. The instant he acknowledged her terror, everything else fell into place. She had had to get drunk to come to him at the hotel that night. She had been miserable throughout their wedding day out of fear of what the night would bring.
Without a doubt she had known she had a serious problem, and she hadn’t shared it because she had been afraid he would walk away, when he was the only guy available to solve all her family problems. While he understood, he couldn’t forgive her for her deception. Nothing could excuse her trickery in demanding a role she could not fulfil. And she still owed him answers.
When Valente entered the bedroom without warning, Caroline slowly lifted her dismayed face from the crumpled pillow. She had never looked plainer. Her hair was a mess, her nose red and her eyes badly swollen. But, oddly enough, her obvious distress soothed Valente, who decided she had rarely looked so appealing. Koko, clearly having triumphed over the bedroom ban, was curled up against her mistress like a Siamese second skin.
‘Why … er … what do you want?’ Caroline prompted tautly.
Valente scooped up the cat, strode back to the door and deposited the outraged and hissing cat back out into the corridor—but not before he had fallen victim to the lightning-fast slash of a punitive little claw across the back of his hand.
‘She’s welcome everywhere else but not in the bedrooms,’ Valente announced, while Caroline studied him as though he had taken a whip to her pet.
‘If you’ve got anything else to say to me, couldn’t it wait until tomorrow?’ she asked.
‘No, it couldn’t. I’ve had a lousy wedding day and an even lousier wedding night. I want to know what turned you off sex.’
‘No! I couldn’t possibly discuss something so private with you,’ Caroline argued in open consternation.
Brilliant eyes dark as ebony, and hard as diamonds in the lamplight, Valente sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘Well, the only other option is for you to discuss the problem with a stranger—a sex therapist.’
Her grey eyes widened, her horror unhidden in the face of what clearly struck her as an even greater challenge.
His sardonic mouth curled. ‘I win by default? Even though a counsellor could be just what you need.’
‘I just don’t want to talk about it,’ she breathed painfully.
Valente threw his broad shoulders back against the pillows. ‘Tough.’
‘What are you doing?’ she gasped, unnerved by his presence back on the bed.
‘Getting comfortable.’ Without a hint of awkwardness, Valente punched the pillows into shape and settled lithely back against them, his long, lean body assuming a relaxed sprawl that mocked her seething tension. ‘Tell me what your last wedding night was like …’
Caroline stiffened, and what colour there was in her cheeks drained away.
In the crushing silence that clawed at her already ragged nerves, Valente rested his shrewd gaze on her only for a moment. He was well aware that he had chosen a vulnerable time to stage his grilling, but equally aware that he was more likely to get the truth out of her. ‘Were you intimate with him before the wedding?’
Caroline shook her head in a silent negative. During those fraught weeks between inadvertently jilting Valente and agreeing to marry Matthew she had rarely been alone with her bridegroom. ‘He didn’t seem interested,’ she confided flatly. ‘Although I didn’t appreciate it at the time, he married me for the business and for the promise he’d be put in charge of it. I was very stupid. I just took it for granted that the private stuff would fall into place. We were married before I realised that I wasn’t the sort of woman he had ever found attractive.’
‘How did you find that out?’
Caroline lay as still as if she was made of solid stone and studied the ceiling, her hands clasped taut, fingernails biting crescents into her tender skin. ‘He was drunk on our wedding night. He—’ her voice sank even lower ‘—he made a lot of jokes about how flat-chested and boyish my body was.’
Tensing at that startling admission, Valente almost groaned his disbelief out loud. ‘Go on …’
‘He got angry with me when I couldn’t respond the way he wanted. He drank a lot and he got rough and he hurt me,’ she muttered in an anguished rush of embarrassment. ‘Then he lost interest. Of course he tried a few other times, and every time it didn’t work he got angrier with me. He said I’d made him impotent and he started sleeping in the room next door.’
Shattered by what he was finding out, Valente breathed, ‘So when did you finally manage to consummate your marriage?’
Caroline swallowed hard. ‘We … didn’t. He had an affair with a woman who was much more his style than I was. He liked to tell me about her—’
Black brows drawing together at the full catastrophic truth of the abusive relationship she had suffered with Bailey, Valente leant closer, his lean, muscular frame very tense. ‘Are you telling me that you never had sex with him?’
In squirming mortification Caroline rolled over, presenting a defensive back to him. ‘After the first three months he never came near me again. He kept up a front around his parents because we lived with them. Luckily it was a very big house. Matt acted like I didn’t exist most of the time.’
Valente rolled her back, so that he could look at her pale heart-shaped face and defeated gaze. Luxuriant jet-dark lashes low over shimmering golden eyes, he breathed huskily, ‘You’re still a virgin?’
‘What does that have to do with anything?’ she almost spat at him, in angry embarrassment over the extent of his probing.
‘It means a great deal to me, belleza mia. It means I’m getting back what I believed had been stolen from me,’ Valente confessed candidly, all his tension evaporating. ‘What else did he do to you? Did he knock you about?’
‘No, he only ever hit me once … when he discovered that I’d searched your name on the internet.’
Valente was appalled. He went from being boyishly pleased that she had sought information about him to being sobered by the price she had paid for her curiosity.
‘It’s time we got some sleep,’ Valente murmured flatly.
‘We?’ she queried anxiously.
‘Si … sleeping apart will only divide us more. I promise that I won’t do anything you don’t want. I also assure you that I won’t get angry, I will never be rough, and I will never, ever hurt you.’ Valente intoned those promises steadily, in his dark, distinctive drawl.
‘Or force me to do anything I don’t want to do?’ she pressed.
Valente set his even white teeth together so hard he almost chipped them. It was well for Matthew Bailey that he was safely dead and buried, for Valente had long loathed men who abused women. ‘Of course not. You must learn to trust me.’
‘That’s so hard,’ she admitted, watching him stride into the dressing room, listening to doors being opened and shut.
Valente emerged with a handful of burgundy-coloured silk which he tossed on the bed. ‘I bought you a new wardrobe as a wedding present. Change out of that robe.’
‘Who does it belong to?’ she asked, with a piercing sensation in her chest.
‘Nobody you need to consider.’
Valente was reflecting that he had always enjoyed a challenge, that nothing he had ever gained had been easily acquired. On the other hand, she had chosen to marry that bastard Matthew, and Valente was not prepared to wait for ever to enjoy the delights of what should have been his. The ache at his groin reminded him that celibacy had never agreed with him, either. Patience promised to be a gruelling challenge.
Too exhausted to protest, Caroline went into the bathroom. There she shed the robe that she guessed had belonged to a former lover and shimmied into the nightdress before scrambling into bed. Valente was getting undressed, and she looked away hurriedly, shrinking from that intimacy.
‘I’m not making any other promises, piccola mia,’ Valente spelt out succinctly. ‘Tonight changed everything between us …’
