As she spun, Vito clamped a hand that bruised round her forearm, his darkly handsome features a mask of rigidly constrained anger. She clashed with glittering golden eyes and paled.
CHAPTER SIX
'How could you do that to me?' Ashley gasped. 'How could you embarrass Josh like that?' Wrathfully unrepentant, Vito poured himself a whisky from the decanter on the library table. 'I warned you. If I hadn't felt sorry for the poor bastard, I'd have hit him! Dio, what sort of a woman are you?'
'What's a kiss on the cheek?' she demanded. 'Josh is an old friend.'
'And presumably the bed sheets have yet to cool,' Vito breathed with stinging derision.
'I won't even dignify that with an answer.'
His sensual mouth was set in a cold line of austerity. 'He's in love with you. As a former victim, I'm an expert on the symptoms. Did you give him the same run-around that you gave me? Was he weak enough to beg? He's a fool. If anyone begs in our relationship, it will be you.'
She shivered, the bite of that menacing assurance making her skin prickle with fear. 'You'd have to kill me first.'
'No, cara,' Vito contradicted silkily. 'All I have to do is take you to bed. Something I plan to do over and over again in the very near future. It would seem it was a mistake to neglect you all week.'
'I-I don't know what you're talking about,' she muttered tightly.
'You looked across at me and then you were all over Hennessy like a second skin.' A heady flush washed her complexion. Yes, she had known he was watching her, indeed had been aware with every fibre of her being. She was too honest with herself to deny the fact. He had hurt her and she had reacted as impulsively as she usually did. She was suddenly ashamed of encouraging Josh to put himself in such an awkward position.
'So why did you do it?' Vito drawled.
Whipped on the raw once too often, she flung back her glorious head of hair and lifted her chin. 'Go to hell,' she said fierily.
'If I go to hell, I take you with me.' His strong, dark features taut with anger, he reached for her. 'I want to know why you found that cheap little exhibition necessary.'
A powerful hand was welded to her narrow shoulder, denying her the retreat she had been about to make. Involuntarily she collided with narrow dark eyes fringed by dense black lashes and the effect was paralysing. Her breath tripped in her throat. 'We should get back to the party.' Vito ran a blunt brown forefinger up the extended line of her throat and she swallowed jerkily. The atmosphere was heavy, intense. Her mouth ran dry, her soft lips parting as she snatched in air. Heat was beginning to surge up inside her. Long fingers glanced caressingly along her jawbone and she had to fight the temptation to turn her cheek into his palm like a sensuous cat begging to be stroked. The hand on her shoulder slid down her rigid spinal cord, tracking her raw tension and then sinking into the narrow indentation just below her waist to ease her closer still.
'The party,' she repeated shakily, struggling to hold on to thoughts already blurred round the edges. His brilliant gaze glittered over her wide eyes and tremulous mouth as his fingers spread over the curve of her hip and pressed her into the hard cradle of his lean thighs. Excitement, wild and inescapable, shock-waved through her. The bold thrust of his erection against her stomach electrified her. She quivered in response and shut her eyes tightly in soundless despair, wanting to feel revulsion, wanting to feel anything but this insane compulsion to uncurl her taut fingers and force him even closer.
'Why?' he persisted.
'Why what?' she mumbled, despising herself. 'Hennessy?'
'Giulia… you hurt me.' The words came in an unsteady rush.
His hands dropped from her and he stepped back, relocating his glass. He left her marooned in the centre of the carpet. Dazedly, she looked at him, the shock of separation shrilling through her nerve-endings with a butcher's efficiency. In the soft pool of the lamplight, he had the beauty of a dark angel but the hard, ruthless angles and sleek lines of a predatory animal. Neither, she registered dully, could have been more coldly merciless in administering punishment. And she was painfully reminded of how easily he had walked away from her once before.
Her legs were wobbling. Her stomach felt seasick but worst of all was that clawing hunger of arousal still clamouring for assuagement. She sank down on to a sofa, pale and drained and deeply ashamed that he could exercise such effortless power over her.
'You really do hate me, don't you?' The question that sought no answer simply slid from her tongue. 'And you blame me for everything that happened four years ago. You don't want to accept that the view is very different from my side of the fence.'
'Is it?' There was no emotion whatsoever in the flat response.
'You walked out, not me,' she condemned in an undertone. 'I needed to find somewhere else to live and I was broke-'
'The rent on that apartment was paid up until the end of the year,' Vito incised drily. 'There was no need for you to move out. I also opened an account for you so that you would not be short of money.'
'Yes…' A choky little laugh escaped her. 'I'll never forget that most sentimental of final farewells. A cheque-book delivered by special messenger. Just what every woman wants as a last touching memory of your undying devotion. What did you think I was? Some little bimbo you had to payoff?'
An almost imperceptible flush demarcated his high cheekbones. 'I was responsible for you. I discharged that responsibility in the only way open to me at that time.'
'I didn't take your money when I lived with you. Why would I take it when you were gone?' she whispered hoarsely. 'I couldn't go back to the flat I'd shared because I sublet it two weeks before you left. That's why I ended up on Steve's couch.'
'The baby… was it mine?' He shot the question at her without warning. He was out of context but she could see by his stillness, his cold concentration that it was really the only topic he was ready to focus on. 'The subject is closed', he had said a week ago, but even Vito was
human.
The raw cruelty of that question pierced her like a knife. And the strength of her own pain surprised her or she had believed that she was prepared for that suspicion. 'How can you ask me that?' she gasped.
In the smouldering pulse of the silence, Vito elevated a satiric ebony brow. Ashley bowed her head, quivering with a hatred that was but a thin patina over a painful surge of confused emotions. Where was her anger? She wanted her anger, she needed that anger. But instead she was suffering a desperate sense of loss and futility. Why did it hurt so much to hate him? Why did she feel so terrifyingly vulnerable? Why all of a sudden did it matter so much that he believed her?
'It was yours.' She surrendered, despising herself for the weakness. 'And-'
'That's all I want to know,' Vito interrupted fiercely. 'But how did you know?' she demanded finally.
'I put a private investigator on you. I was curious.' Vito cast her a freezingly shuttered glance but one brown hand clenched into a fist in betrayal as he spoke. 'I believed that there was another man involved. In the end that angle was immaterial. Purely by accident, I discovered that you had a far more powerful reason for wanting me out of your life.’
Ashley flinched. He thought that she would have gone to any lengths to ensure that she had the freedom to dispose of their unborn child. It was a sordid picture and one she did not have the means to dispel. In her absence she had been convicted and sentenced four years ago and he was allowing her no right of appeal.
'You won't listen to me,' she pointed out strickenly. 'But I didn't have the abortion. I changed my mind. I had a miscarriage a couple of months later.'
'We should return to the party.'
'Vito, you can't do this to me!' she cried.