Second Time Bride

Daisy raced up the stairs like a woman jet-propelled. Not one more moment would she spend in this house, not one more moment...not for Tara, not for anybody! She was getting out right now! Her breath catching in sobs in her throat, she trailed her still unpacked suitcase across the dressing-room floor and struggled to close it, stuffing in sleeves and protruding hems of clothing disarranged in her haste to get dressed only minutes earlier.

‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at now?’ Alessio enquired from the doorway.

Daisy jerked round on her knees, two spots of enraged colour burning over her cheekbones. ‘Get out of my way, you swine! No, you’re not a swine, you’re lower than that! You’re a snake—a sneaky, sly, double-dealing, stupid snake...because if you think I intend to stay here and put up with you, your girlfriend and your shrew of a sister you’re living in fantasy land!’

Alessio folded his arms and stood his ground. ‘You’re not going anywhere, piccola mia,’ he spelt out rawly.

‘Do you think that treating me like a child means you can ground me like one?’ Daisy launched back, angrier than she had ever been in her life, her eyes burning an incandescent violet challenge.

‘I think that if I strip you naked, trash all your clothes and keep you locked in the bedroom you’ll find it a little difficult to stray beyond these walls.’

‘You wouldn’t dare!’ Daisy told him, flying furiously upright.

‘Try me,’ Alessio invited with soft menace, his shimmering eyes striking threatening sparks off her incredulous stare. ‘When my daughter’s happiness is at risk, I don’t think there is anything that I wouldn’t dare.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means that the day you walk out on this marriage I start fighting to keep Tara in Italy with me. I will not be shut out of her life again,’ Alessio asserted with harsh emphasis.

Daisy went white with shock, a shiver of cold fear slithering down her rigid spine. That uncompromising threat electrified her. All of a sudden, Bianca’s spiteful allegations no longer seemed quite so fanciful. Alessio was already letting her know that if their marriage failed he would fight to retain custody of their daughter. Was it at all possible that he might also be planning to use Daisy for as long as he needed her to get Tara settled in... before dispensing with her services as a wife and mother altogether? Or was that a paranoid suspicion?

‘You are scaring me,’ Daisy muttered in a surge of involuntary candour.

‘Maybe you scare me when you haul out a suitcase barely twenty-four hours after you say “I do” for the second time!’ Alessio was very pale beneath his golden skin but fierce determination harshly delineated his sculpted bone structure. ‘Now, I don’t expect you to become bosom pals with my sister but I do expect a mature acceptance that my family are also Tara’s family and that when she arrives here at the end of the week she does not need to be dragged into the midst of some continuing, petty war that started before she was even born!’

‘I did not restart the war.’

Alessio spread his lean, strong hands in a bold arc of impatience with a subject he clearly considered beneath his notice. ‘I will not allow Tara to come home to us for the first time and find a hostile atmosphere—’

‘And what are you intending to do to improve that atmosphere?’ A laugh that was no laugh at all escaped Daisy as she recalled the humiliation of his earlier rejection. Fighting blindly to conserve her pride, torn with savage pain and confusion, she thrust up her chin in defiance. ‘I hate you, Alessio. I really hate you for what you’ve done to me today!’

‘Or maybe you hate me for what I didn’t do!’ Throwing her off balance, Alessio cast an explicit and suggestive glance back towards the disordered bed. Bold eyes flaming over her, he murmured thickly, ‘I can hardly believe now that I walked away from temptation.’

Affected more than she could bear by that mercurial change of mood and direction, her breasts rising and falling with the accelerated pace of her breathing, Daisy said with hoarse emphasis, ‘You’ll get your face slapped if you try to walk back again!’