'How very inconvenient.'Claudia oozed sympathy. 'Will you be selling Sea Spring now?'
'Certainly not for my benefit. My aunt tends to exaggerate,' Sara interposed ruefully.
'Venice has to be the most romantic city in the world,' DeniseChilton commented warmly. 'I can't think of anywhere more wonderful to spend your honeymoon.'
'But then you didn't grow up here…Alex did,' Tony's wife slotted in sweetly.
A near-overpowering desire to empty her glass over Claudia's head assailed Sara as the first course was delivered.
The meal progressed. Alex smoothly engaged Tony in conversation. Sara's cheeks stopped burning. Their hostess was one of Alex's exes, Sara gathered grimly, dumped with the roses and the diamonds and still simmering over the blow to her ego. She would have to develop a thicker skin for such encounters.
'You know, the resemblance is really quite remarkable,' Claudia murmured very quietly over the coffee-cups when Denise had disappeared off to the cloakroom.
Sara lifted her head. 'Sorry?'
'Alex's father and Tony are old friends. We dined with them in London last week. Apparently Sandro was staggered the first time he saw you,' Claudia continued very softly.
'I'm afraid I don't follow…'
'You're the living image of Alex's one and only true love.' Claudia's eyes were bright with spiteful amusement. 'Sandro got a shock when he saw you coming down the aisle. For a moment he thought you were Elissa. Silly, of course…she'd be twenty years older than you now… but don't they say that everyone has a double somewhere?'
A creeping veil of coldness was slowly enclosing Sara. Her brain was in a fog. She could not seem to absorb what Claudia was telling her.
'I never actually met her,' Claudia confided. 'But when Tony and I got home I dug out some old family photo albums to satisfy my curiosity.'
'Family albums?'Sara questioned with a frown.
'Elissa was married to Tony's cousin at the time she took off with Alex… didn't you know that?'
Sara's tongue snaked out to moisten her dry lower lip. 'His cousin?' she said weakly, shooting an involuntary glance at the three men on the other side of the table, who were enjoying an animated, friendly conversation. Elissa had been married when Alex met her?
'You do have a lot to learn. Everyone blamed her, even Tony. Alex was only a boy and she was one devastating lady. Very petite, hourglass figure, long black hair just like you.Alex never did get over her. She turned him into a cold bastard. But then you're something special, aren't you?' Claudia touched her glass against the rim of Sara's in a mocking toast. 'Only with you can Alex relive his fantasy…and he doesn't even need to switch off the light!'
CHAPTER EIGHT
'[FEEL Like a bath…' Sara mumbled, heading for the en suite bathroom like a homing pigeon seeking sanctuary.
'Sara, did Claudia say something to upset you?'
Sara paused, her slim back rigid, and then turned her dark head. 'What on earth could she have said?' she managed with apparent blankness.
Alex loosened his tie and surveyed her with intent dark eyes that were sharp enough to strip paint. 'Five years ago I met her at a wedding and invited her to a dinner party. She amused herself by shredding the looks and reputation of every other woman present. She's poisonous. I didn't see her again, nor did I sleep with her.'
Hot colour had drenched Sara's former pallor. 'You don't need to explain that to me,' she told him uncomfortably.
'Because you really don't care either way, do you, cara?' A tiny muscle pulled taut at the corner of Alex's compressed mouth, his narrowed eyes more slivers of glittering gold intensity as he stared back at her.
'It's not like that…I mean, I'm not an idiot,' she muttered, her head pounding with so much tension that she was beginning to feel physically sick. 'I know you have a past… obviously.'
'And a wife who doesn't have a jealous, possessive bone in her body. I am so fortunate,' Alex breathed with the suggestion of gritted teeth.
Sara looked back at him, bewildered by a dialogue which barely a tenth of her brain could concentrate on. 'Alex…I'm not feeling very well,' she whispered strickenly, her stomach twisting more than ever with the tension in the room.
'You don't need to make excuses and you don't need to hide in the bathroom either,' Alex delivered in a slashing undertone. 'I have no desire to share the same bed with you tonight!'
Bewilderment seized Sara as he strode out of the room.
Her wretched tummy heaved. She fled into the bathroom and was very much preoccupied for some minutes. Finally, she rested her perspiring forehead against the cold surround of the bath and slowly got a grip on herself again before she began to undress. ClaudiaBargani was vindictive. Alex had said it,Sara knew it for a fact. Normally she wouldn't have given credence to anything such a woman told her. But Claudia's revelation had still plunged Sara into deep shock. Why? Because taken in tandem with Sara's sudden marriage that revelation threatened to make a terrifying kind of sense.
Could Alex have wanted her only because she reminded him of Elissa? Did Alex even realise what might have attracted him to her? Or could the similarity be so striking that he had immediately recognised it? Whichever, she was left with the degrading possibility that she might well owe her present position as Alex's wife to something as agonisingly superficial as her face and her body. Not to mention being left at the mercy of a lot of really creepy, utterly degrading thoughts, she reflected in a tempest of angry pain.
Everyone had been stunned when Alex had married her. Sara had been stunned too when he'd proposed, She had been equally shaken by the discovery that Alex had been wildly attracted to her for the entire year that she had worked for him. But if she reminded Alex of the woman he had loved and lost, the woman he had never forgotten, what made her worthy of such ob-sessive desirability now seemed obvious. Was it possible that she owed everything they had shared since their marriage to the memory of another woman? The intensity of his interest, the exclusive attention, the extraordinary passion…?
She knew that she was tearing herself apart-in short, doing exactly what Claudia had wanted her to do-but she couldn't seem to stop doing it. But maybe Claudia had simply made it all up; maybe Claudia had a wildly inventive imagination. Sara curled up in a tight ball in a bed that felt horribly big, cold and empty. She was so tense that her muscles hurt, but it didn't really matter because it seemed to her that every fibre of her being was in agony.
She loved Alex… but suddenly she hated him too- for having the power to put her through such mental hoops of fire. Wild images of revenge swept her imagination. In every one of them Alex stood looking totally defeated while she packed her bags with frigid dignity and disdain and left him flat, publicly deserted him after two weeks of marriage. The door opened. She… sat up with a jerk, switched on the bedside lights.
Alex was already standing beside the bed, quite magnificently nude and characteristically unconcerned by the fact.
'What do you want?' she demanded fierily.
'You,' Alex said succinctly.
Anger gleamed like a hurricane warning in his golden gaze and her engrossing revenge scenario sagged like a sofa bereft of its stuffing. Alex was a long way from total defeat. Aggression emanated from every line of his lithe, sun-bronzed body as he slid into bed and reached for her with hands far too strong to be easily evaded. In one smooth movement he forced her down and flat again, anchoring her furious body into stillness with his own.
Her teeth clenched in disbelief. 'If you don't get off me, Alex, I'll hit you!'
Alex propped his chin on the heel
of one hand, his tawny eyes ablaze with very male provocation. 'Be my guest,' he challenged.
Her hands bunched into fists. He lowered his glossy dark head and took her mouth with a raw heat that scorched. A splintering shard of answering passion pierced her, overpowering every other sense. He bruised her lips and yet still her hands opened out and clutched at him with a hunger she couldn't deny. Indeed the hunger felt sharper, stronger, more desperate than ever before, leaving her utterly defenceless. He leant back from her when she was breathless, her heartbeat racing fast enough to choke her, every skin cell and pulse thrumming with wild response.
As she struggled to focus on his intent dark profile, he closed hard fingers over the fragile silk screening her heaving breasts and quite coolly ripped it away, the sound of the rending fabric preternaturally loud in the throbbing silence. Momentarily Sara went stiff with fright, and then she watched his hand curve round the pouting swell of her own naked flesh, his thumb grazing across a straining pink nipple, and a hot, deep melting started inside her, reducing her to boneless, quivering collusion.
He let his tongue flick over the achingly sensitive peak and a strangled whimper escaped her as her whole body pushed up to him in an unstoppable wave of response. He lifted his head again, glittering gold eyes sweeping over her as he wrenched her free of the tangled remnants of silk confining her legs. He ran a sure hand back up the tightening length of one slender thigh and discovered the moist warmth of her most delicate flesh, and the spiralling excitement that he could evoke with the tiniest caress sent her ever more violently out of control.