Second-Time Bride

And if Alessio had blamed her for just about everything that had gone wrong between them, hadn’t she been guilty of doing the exact same thing to him? When had she ever looked back and acknowledged that she had made mistakes too? She had dug her head into the sand and hoped and prayed that their problems would magically melt away. Paralysed by the fear that she was losing him, she had done nothing constructive either, she reflected with growing discomfiture.

‘Alessio...?’ Daisy whispered thickly, and then, frowning, she turned her head.

But Alessio had already gone, leaving her alone. Just as quickly the past lost the power to hold her. It was the present which was tearing her apart. Alessio could freely admit to having forced her back into marriage and yet his conscience remained clear. In his view, she had committed a far greater sin in denying him all knowledge of his child. And as Tara’s mother she was merely a useful adjunct to Alessio’s desire to have full custody of his daughter. As a woman, as a wife, she didn’t count.

With that depressing thought, Daisy fell asleep.

A hand on her shoulder shook her half-awake. Daisy focused blearily on the photo album lodged mere inches in front of her face.

‘Who is that?’ Alessio enquired, a lean finger indicating the male standing beside her and a three-year-old Tara in one of the photos.

Daisy made an effort to concentrate. ‘That was George—’

‘And this character?’ Alessio flipped over a page.

Daisy focused uncertainly on another male face. ‘Daniel... I think.’

Another page turned. A giant yawn crept up on her as she peered at the handsome blond man whom Alessio was now indicating. She looked blank. ‘I don’t remember him—’

‘You don’t remember him? I’m not surprised!’ Alessio blistered down at her, making her jump in shock. ‘Tara gave me six albums. Every one of them is full of strange men! You could run an international dating agency out of the male contingent in your photographs!’

Daisy gazed up at him with wide, drowsy eyes filled with incomprehension.

‘Tara told me that you didn’t date, that you hardly ever went out...’

Daisy’s sleepy eyes opened even wider. She was shocked that her daughter could have told such a whopper. She had always enjoyed a reasonably healthy social life.

With a not quite steady hand, Alessio snapped the offending album shut. ‘I suspected a certain amount of exaggeration on that point.’ Scorching golden eyes raked her small, sleep-flushed face accusingly. ‘But I had no idea what she was covering up! What about the toy boy?’

‘Toy boy?’ Daisy repeated dazedly, hanging on every explosive word that emerged from between his bloodless, compressed lips.

‘He was the latest, wasn’t he?’ Alessio surveyed her with sudden, icy derision, anger reined in as his expressive mouth clenched as hard as a vice. ‘Dio...you’ve been sleeping around ever since you divorced me!’

As the door slammed on his exit, Daisy’s jaw dropped. Sleeping around? Was he crazy? Sex had just about wrecked her life at seventeen and she had learnt that lesson well. Casual intimacy was not for her. She might have had no shortage of male company over the years but she had never fallen in love again—hadn’t wanted to either, she acknowledged honestly—and it had always seemed easier to end relationships when they’d demanded more than she’d been prepared to give.

Janet, she reflected drowsily, might say that she had a fear of commitment that amounted to paranoia, but she herself thought that she had been very sensible. No man had caused her grief in thirteen years. She was proud of that record and not at all proud of the fact that she had been a mass of painful and grieving nerve-endings from the instant that Alessio had come back into her life.

Daisy shifted in voluptuous relaxation. The bed was very comfortable. Memory slowly stirred. A slight frown-line divided her brows. She had the oddest recollection of a meal being thrust under her nose when being forced to stay awake had felt like the cruellest torture. She had pleaded for the mercy of a bed.

And had Alessio really said, ‘If you don’t eat, you don’t sleep,’ and cut up a steak into tiny, bite-sized pieces while her head had sunk back down on the supporting heel of her hand and her eyelids had kept on closing no matter how hard she tried to keep them open? He had been so damnably domineering, but the chocolate gateau which had come next had melted in her mouth and for the first time in a week her stomach had felt settled instead of queasily empty.