‘I blamed your family for what happened as much as I blamed you.’
A stricken look crossed Caroline’s visage. ‘But you knew there was no way I could have made it to the church. You knew how sorry I was that my message didn’t reach you in time,’ she reasoned feverishly. ‘I know my parents behaved badly, and that you were treated unfairly, but I don’t believe that we did anything that could excuse you for deliberately setting out to destroy our business.’
Valente was wondering why she was saying that there had been no way she could have made it to the church. He was exasperated by his ignorance of the excuses she had no doubt employed in that letter, but determined not to expose it. As for this message she was now mentioning for the first time: he did not believe there had ever been one. Her family had wanted rid of him by any means, and ensuring that he was left standing like a fool at the altar had been a very effective method of deterring him from seeking any further contact.
‘I wanted you all to pay for what you did,’ Valente confessed.
A humourless laugh was wrenched from her soft pink mouth. ‘You don’t think three and a half years of marriage to Matthew Bailey was penance enough for me?’
Valente wore a guarded look that gave nothing away. ‘As far as I knew at the time you were enjoying a happy marriage with your childhood sweetheart. It was only after Bailey’s death that I learned that it hadn’t been quite that perfect.’
‘But Matthew and I were never childhood sweethearts!’ Caroline argued with spirit. ‘Where did you get that idea? We were friends-casual friends. I thought a lot of him, and I respected his opinion. I admit that I was entirely taken in by him until I became his wife. But there was never any romance between us-either before or after we married. I married him on the rebound.’
‘The phrase “childhood sweethearts” came from your own father’s lips. Joe came to see me the week before our wedding and accused me of having come between you and Matthew and ruining your life. He said it was Matthew whom you really loved and he tried to buy me off.’
Caroline was aghast. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that Dad had done that? I had no idea.’
‘There had already been enough bad feeling, and you were living on your nerves. I didn’t want to put you under any more pressure and I was confident that you loved me,’ Valente admitted, with a bitter twist to his handsome mouth.
‘I did love you…I did!’ Caroline proclaimed in a shaken tone. ‘But you never responded to my letters. You never phoned. You don’t do emotion or forgiveness, do you? The very fact it’s taken almost two months for us even to discuss the past says it all. You just scrubbed me out of your life like I didn’t matter to you!’
His lean strong face was darkening with indignation. ‘What did you expect after leaving me standing at the church? It would be a rare man who could forgive an offence of that magnitude.’
‘You just didn’t love me enough, Valente,’ Caroline condemned vehemently. ‘When you tell me now that you’ll never feel like that for me again, it’s not really that great a loss, is it? A man who really loved me would have overcome his injured pride and talked to me again-but not you. So much for love! You just deserted me.’
Lean, olive-skinned features hard with anger, Valente spread wide his arms and threw up both hands in a bold physical demonstration of his wrathful rejection of that scenario. ‘I…deserted…you?’
‘I was crushed. I thought I had nothing left to live for-and there was Matthew, being a very sympathetic and staunch friend in my hour of need,’ Caroline recalled, stinging tears filling her eyes as she looked back at that fateful period of her life. ‘Before very long my parents were pointing out how happy they would be if I married Matthew. He proposed. You weren’t there. I gave in to the pressure-a marriage of friends, Matt called it, but even our friendship didn’t last. Yes, I was an idiot, and I let myself fell into a stupid trap, but if I hadn’t been so unhappy I would never have been that silly!’
Her explanation bore not the smallest resemblance to Valente’s assumptions at the time. ‘I thought you had only used me to make Matthew jealous. I also believed that you had realised you loved him more than me.’
With an unsteady hand, Caroline dashed away her tears. ‘Well, maybe if you’d had enough interest you would have found out the truth for yourself.’ Her grey eyes darkened and her soft mouth compressed. ‘But why are we even having this conversation now?’
‘We’re having it because it’s a conversation we should have had a long time ago,’ Valente conceded between gritted white teeth, violently wound up by her accusations and full of rage, but refusing to parade the emotions storming through hi
m.
‘All that doesn’t matter any more. I’m more interested in your ownership of Bomark Logistics,’ Caroline admitted, bringing the dialogue full circle back to what she saw as the most important question. ‘That you chose, three years after we broke up, to pursue a goal of revenge at any cost truly horrifies me. It proves all over again to me that I must be a rotten judge of character.’
‘I’m not like you, bella mia,’ Valente breathed. ‘When someone injures me I don’t turn the other cheek, and I never will.’
A belligerent glint in her usually soft gaze, Caroline drew herself up straight to her full height. She was so tense that her muscles ached in protest at her stance. ‘But to have set up another haulage firm solely to destroy my family’s livelihood is beyond forgiveness.’
‘I wanted you. All along, my only goal was to gain access to you.’
‘But you started this three years ago, when Matthew was still alive and I was his wife!’
Valente veiled his black-lashed unrepentant gaze. He had pinned his colours to the mast and he wasn’t the man to retreat. ‘Whether you were married or otherwise made no difference to me.’
Caroline rested shaken eyes on him and then turned away, wandering over to the windows to stare sightlessly out at the superbly evocative Venetian skyline. He was so aggressive, so destructive, so unashamed of the methods he had employed. In a word? Ruthless. Yet once he had shielded her from that side of his character, persuading her that he was a much more humane and understanding character. This was the man she loved?
‘No cost was too high to pay, was it?’ Caroline accused in a sudden surge of disgust as she totted up the consequences of his behaviour. ‘What do you think the slow decline of Hales and the loss of those contracts did to my father’s health? It broke his heart. It was his father’s firm, and he was horribly ashamed that he couldn’t keep it in business. You didn’t care that you were hurting my family because you still thought I had let you down.’
His jawline took on an even more stubborn angle. He stood there with the macho air of a male urging her to throw whatever she liked at him and see how well he would withstand the barrage. ‘You did let me down.’
‘How did I let you down? By falling ill? By being in hospital the night before our wedding? How was that my fault?’ Caroline launched at him shakily. ‘That was fate. The second thoughts and the doubts and fears that tormented me the next morning while you were at the church were my fault. I admit that, but I still wasn’t well enough to get out of that bed and do anything for myself.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Valente was forced to growl, the reference to hospital having cut through his reserve and ignited his frustration. ‘I told you that I didn’t read your letters.’