The Heat Of Passion

lMadre di Dio!' he launched down at her with a groan. 'It was a joke!'

She shut her eyes, too shattered to comprehend and then abruptly she rolled over, curling into a defensive foetal position as far away from him as she could get.

'It never happened! You think I'm some sort of pervert?' Carlo grated in frustration. 'I made it up... all of it! 1 was joking! I gave you what you seemed to expect. I do have a red-headed Amazon on my staff but she happens to be built like a tank and the happily married mother of four kids. I will never, ever buy you perfume again...'

Her nose wrinkled to force back the flood of tears threatening. The aftermath of shock, but she would sooner have been boiled alive than cry in front of him. 'If you were hanging off the edge of a cliff, I'd stand on your fingers,' she told him jerkily.

She heard paper tearing. A bottle of Obsession landed beside her.

'The name caught my eye,' he raked down at her, 'and the stupid bitch behind the counter sprayed some of it round me. That was yesterday and I still can't get rid of it!'

A long silence stretched. Her teeth bit into the hand she had wedged against her mouth but she couldn't stop the faint tremors still racking through her.

'I am sorry.' He sounded frustrated, furious and out of his depth. 'I didn't intend to upset you.'

Pull the other one, she thought bitterly, forcing herself to face head-on the extent of her self-betrayal. He tells you he's been with another woman and you go to pieces and start throwing up. Anguish trammelled through her afresh.

'There has been no woman in my bed for many weeks. Is that what you want to hear?'

No, what she really wanted to hear, she registered in agony, was that there had been no other woman in six years. Carlo had concentrated her mind wonderfully. She didn't have any secrets from herself now. No secret and no proud pretence could survive after what he had just put her through. She could not bear to think of him with another woman...all these years had not once permitted herself to envisage that reality, had not even dreamt that that reality could be so tormentingly painful to her.

Deep down inside her subconscious, Carlo had been hers alone. And until now she had never even known that that crazy belief existed inside her. But now the horrendous possessiveness she had discovered twisted like a knife in an open wound. She had no right to feel possessive about Carlo, no excuse to be torn apart by the most bitter and violent jealousy.

Beside her the mattress gave. 'What are you thinking?' Carlo demanded.

'Bastard!' she gasped helplessly.

'Was Turner unfaithful?’

One and one make two. Two and two make four. Carlo was already acting on signals received and computing possibilities like a champion downhill skier racing triumphantly for the finishing line. She couldn't even be bothered going through the motions of attempting to throw him off the scent. 'No,' she said wearily.

But she had grown up in the shadow of constant infidelity. Her mother had been quite unashamed of her promiscuity. Sexual freedom had been a destructive drug she was hooked on, and the older Jessica got, the more blatantly Carole had flaunted her beliefs and her men.

Jessica had found that even more deeply offensive than the screaming fits of abuse her father had regularly withstood. Forced to live in the turmoil of her parents'

deeply destructive marriage, she had also been forced to stand silent and blind on the sidelines, neither commenting nor taking sides. Perhaps that was when she had begun to repress her own emotions.

'You wanted to know why I never talk about my family,' she said flatly. ‘ Well, here goes. My mother was once asked to leave the Deangate Hotel because the management suspected her of soliciting.'

'Soliciting?' Carlo repeated the term as though it was foreign to him.

'She used to pick up men in the bar and go up to their rooms. Not for money, for kicks. Sometimes she brought them home... the first time, I was ten,’ Jessica confided shakily, 'I didn't know she was home. I was doing my homework in the kitchen and then I heard her laughing. I went upstairs and she was doing a strip for this guy...'

Carlo expelled his breath in a hiss. 'What did you do?’

'I ran away and told Simon. He told me not to tell,’

An embittered laugh yanked painfully at her aching

throat. ‘I never told. I never told once. Daddy's little

princess wasn't supposed to know about things like that.

But God knows, everybody else knew my mother was

the local tart. The boys at school used to laugh about

her and ask me to do all sorts of... interesting things