‘But it’ll be a fake, not a real wedding,’ Vivi reminded him dismissively. ‘I can do whatever I like in the meantime.’
‘Not if there’s a risk that you could be pregnant by me,’ Raffaele bit out wrathfully. ‘At the very least that should’ve kept you away from other men!’
Vivi’s eyes lit up with violet flames of anger because she could not credit that he could believe he had any rights over her. At the same time, she was struggling against an almost overwhelming need to stare at him and drink in his visual presence like an addictive drug. And the awareness of those conflicting urges only infuriated her more and made her tongue sharper.
‘Nothing would keep me away from other men, least of all a very unlikely possibility of that sort!’ she challenged back with ringing emphasis. ‘You don’t own me, Raffaele, so don’t behave as though you do!’
‘That is not how I am behaving,’ Raffaele proclaimed with a raw edge to his accented drawl, his lean, darkly handsome features set hard as granite. ‘You’re not in a position to be with anyone else right now.’
‘And how do you make that out?’ Vivi prompted very drily, aware of his fury because the very atmosphere was smouldering with his tension. His eyes were bright as gilded metal, his sculpted bone structure rigid. Yet on some level she wanted to move closer and smooth her fingertips over the rigidity of his shapely mouth, breathe in the scent of his skin, feel the heat of him. But how could she still want such things from him? After all that had happened between them, how could he still make her feel that way? It reminded her that her only real defence with Raffaele was to keep him at a safe distance and if that made him angry, so be it.
‘Do I really need to spell it out?’
‘I think you do because I’m not getting it,’ Vivi admitted shakily. ‘I can’t see why anything that I do should be your business either before or after this stupid wedding. It’s not as though we’re in a relationship.’
‘Che diavolo!’ he intoned with suppressed savagery, stalking across the small room like a volcano threatening to erupt. ‘If you do prove to be pregnant, am I supposed to take your word for it that you have not been with another man since you were with me?’
Those harsh words slammed into Vivi like bricks. Loathing and anger engulfed her in a heady wave. He thought she had gone from sleeping with him to sleeping with another man that fast? That she was such a treacherous slut that she couldn’t even be trusted to act in a fair and decent way? Incredulous at the insult, Vivi walked out to the front door.
‘What are you doing?’ Raffaele demanded.
White with anger, Vivi yanked open the door. ‘Waiting for you to leave.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Either you leave or I call the police and have you removed,’ Vivi warned him fiercely. ‘You’re a hateful, arrogant, insensitive man and I refuse to have anything more to do with you! Get out!’
‘I spoke only the truth. I said out loud what any man would’ve been thinking,’ Raffaele argued succinctly in his own defence.
‘Out!’ Vivi exclaimed breathlessly. ‘How dare you insult me? How dare you suggest that I would go from making that mistake with you to making it with someone else as well? Who the heck do you think you are? And if you think I’m going to marry you now, you’ve got another thought coming!’
‘Vivi,’ Raffaele breathed in a driven undertone, staring down at her, willing her to calm down, but her vibrant face was frozen and her eyes were as luminous with temper as distant stars.
‘Go!’ Vivi snapped impatiently.
Raffaele left, colour mantling his high cheekbones, a huge sense of angry dissatisfaction gripping him. He had wanted to know who the boyfriend was, how long she had been seeing him, where they had spent the evening. But, inexplicably, he had asked none of those questions. Why? His brain had zeroed in on the suspicion that she had now become intimate with the other man and he hadn’t been able to think beyond that disturbing level. Apart from the putative possibility of a pregnancy and the lines that would be blurred if she was also having sex with someone else, why had he got so angry?
He couldn’t possibly be jealous. He didn’t have a jealous bone in his entire body, had never once experienced that unpleasant emotion. He stayed in control of his emotions, rose above the negative aspects and refused to give them ground, he reminded himself stubbornly. But he had lost the detachment he valued so highly and had contrived to offend Vivi into threatening not to marry him, after all. She didn’t mean it, of course, he told himself doggedly, of course she didn’t mean it. Nobody got so mad that they burned their boats while still sitting in them, not even Vivi could be that foolish...
* * *
The next morning, Vivi was packing a travelling bag when Zoe appeared in the doorway. ‘You had a fight with him last night,’ she muttered, wide-eyed with consternation. ‘You told him you weren’t going to marry him, after all.’
‘And he didn’t listen!’ Vivi hissed back between furiously gritted teeth. ‘Raffaele doesn’t listen to what he doesn’t want to hear. Well, he’ll soon find out that I mean what I say.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m going down to John and Liz for a few days. I need a break and I’ve got some holiday time to use. If I hurry I can catch the early train,’ she pointed out, looking at her younger sister with belated concern. ‘Will you be all right here on your own for a while?’
‘Of course,’ Zoe assured her, gently removing a top from Vivi’s crushing grip to shake it out and fold it neatly before slotting it into the bag for her enraged sibling. ‘If you don’t marry him, where does that leave John and Liz?’
Vivi swallowed hard, thinking it took Zoe to voice that leading question and paling as the consequences of her angry refusal formed in front of her. ‘I don’t know. I’ll work something out,’ she swore.
Raffaele had always prided himself on his nerves of steel but when Vivi extended her leave and stayed missing right up until forty-eight hours before the wedding, he was desperate enough to visit her sister again and ask if she knew where she was.
‘Our foster parents’ place,’ Zoe revealed. ‘I assumed you must know.’
Raffaele clenched his teeth, got the address and organised a helicopter. He didn’t know what he was planning to say to Vivi. He toyed with the idea of telling her the truth about that dossier on Arianna but who could tell what would happen if he opened that can of worms? Would she even care about the threat to her former friend’s happines
s? Would that revelation cause trouble between her and her grandfather? And if it did cause trouble, how might that rebound on Raffaele and Arianna when he could not picture the older man backing down? He had no answers to those questions and decided he would have to work out his strategy according to what he learned when he got there.
That particular morning was a very trying one for Vivi. She had spent ten days with her foster parents in the familiar hurly-burly whirl of life at the old farmhouse. Not much had changed there. There was still a queue for the single bathroom every morning, noisily knocked doors, raised voices, shouts, squabbles and the thunder of noisy impatient feet on the stairs. Only when she heard John drive off with a carload of teenagers to do the school run did she emerge from the attic room where she had been staying. When she crept into the now vacant bathroom, she could hear Liz clattering round downstairs while she tidied up the kitchen and Vivi’s heart was in her mouth as she opened the pregnancy testing kit she had bought the day before.
She was late and she had never been late before, her cycle usually being as regular as clockwork. Furthermore, the signs she had assumed were signalling the arrival of her period had intensified without the expected event arriving. She had waited and waited, hoped and prayed but the sensitivity of her breasts, the occasional bouts of nausea and the other unusual changes troubling her had persisted.
It couldn’t be, it simply couldn’t be, she was thinking as she performed the test with shaking hands and sat down to wait for the result. It couldn’t possibly happen with Raffaele di Mancini, whom she hated...could it? No, fate couldn’t be that cruel. Her hands coiled together tight and squeezed hard. She had had sex with him without precautions. Logic warned her that she deserved whatever she got from that ill-judged encounter. It was not as though she were stupid, it was not as though she hadn’t known the risk as well as any other young woman. Unhappily, common sense hadn’t featured in that episode and now she was appreciating that passion was even more dangerous than she had thought and that uncontrolled passion in that particular field could mean life-changing consequences.