t 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?’