A Savage Betrayal

He sprang up again. ‘Don’t pretend that you didn’t want me as much as I wanted you,’ he murmured with cruel bite. ‘And don’t get me mixed up with any of your other bed partners. Crocodile tears leave me cold. I can see right through you——’

‘You’re blind!’ Mina muttered strickenly, bowing her head over her raised knees.

‘Stronger than you are. Harder than you are,’ Cesare informed her crushingly. ‘And a whole lot nastier when I’m crossed. Remember that and we’ll get on fine.’

She heard the door open.

‘Eight tonight. If you pull yourself together by then, I’ll take you out to dinner.’

‘You don’t say,’ Mina breathed in a deadened voice.

‘You look as if you could do with feeding up——’

‘The way you fatten a turkey up for the oven.’ She felt physically sick, fully punished already for her own wanton lack of control in his arms. He would feed her and bed her. Use her until he got bored and, heaven knew, Cesare didn’t stay with any woman for very long. He was determined to turn her into the equivalent of a sex toy he played with when he was in the mood, and she was willing to bet that he wasn’t planning dinner anywhere where he might run into his friends or the Press.

‘What the hell is the matter with you?’ he suddenly shot at her.

She flinched. ‘Nothing.’

‘Stop looking so bloody pathetic, then!’

She curved her trembling hands round her knees. ‘I’m tired, that’s all,’ she muttered, simply desperate for him to leave.

He bent down and tugged with disturbing gentleness at a strand of her tumbled golden hair. ‘I didn’t plan it this way,’ he murmured, crouching down beside the bed. ‘But I’d be a liar if I said I was sorry it happened. I don’t want you to have any defences with me.’

‘No,’ she conceded unevenly, well aware that he had quite deliberately ripped all her defences away in one cathartic encounter, and that now he was on a high, callously unconcerned by what that same encounter might have done to her.

‘Get some sleep…Dio mio…how could anyone sleep in this coffin?’ he muttered with raw distaste.

He caught her hand and pressed a key into it with a grim sigh. ‘You can stay in my town house but only for a couple of days. I’ll send a car over to pick you up in an hour.’ He straightened, strode back to the door again. ‘I get in about six,’ he murmured huskily.

And on this occasion she could read his mind. It made her cringe. She listened to the door close, a sob stuck like a giant boulder in her aching throat. Never, ever again would she allow him to do this to her. She would be out of here for good long before that hour was up, and so what if running like a rabbit was craven?

With the resistance she had to Cesare Falcone, only yet another complete fresh start would suffice. With him she was a tramp, wholly deserving of every insult he directed at her. It didn’t matter that she had never been with any other man. Her pride and her intelligence had all the consistency of jelly around Cesare. But what mattered most of all was what he could do to her emotions.

She was lost in a terrifying sea of pain and drained of fight and anger. She could never recall experiencing such bitter turmoil. At the back of her mind she knew that, regardless of everything, running away wasn’t going to take the pain of self-betrayal away. That pain was going to stay with her for a long time.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘WHEN can you start?’ Steve Clayton prompted cheerfully.

‘Monday, if you like.’ Mina chewed anxiously at her lower lip. ‘Are you sure you really want me to work here?’

‘Mina,’ Steve groaned, ‘maybe you’re forgetting that I offered you the same job four years ago and you were too damned proud to take it!’

His mobile phone buzzed. Mina wandered over to the door, worriedly hoping that she had made the right decision in accepting the secretarial job she had once turned down…but secretly longed to accept. Times had changed, hadn’t they?

Until their death in a car accident, her parents had rented a house on the Thwaite Manor estate. Steve was Baxter Keating’s other grandson and Roger’s cousin. The two boys and the Carroll twins had grown up together and dated as teenagers. The four of them had always been very close. There had never been any doubt that Roger and Winona would eventually marry and, although Mina was reluctant to recall the fact, Steve had expected that same commitment from her.

But it hadn’t happened. Mina had outgrown her youthful crush on Steve and it had taken a great deal of courage finally to face him and tell him that truth. Roger and Winona had already been married and they had been as disappointed and hurt on Steve’s behalf as Steve had been. Mina had felt horribly guilty that she had changed and Steve had not.

Her guilt had increased a hundredfold when Steve had asked her to marry him when she was pregnant with Susie. She had wished he hadn’t asked, had felt even worse saying no, and had felt similarly unable to accept the job he’d then offered instead. The job would have been a lifeline but she had known that Steve still cherished notions of them getting back together again. In the circumstances it would have been wrong for her to accept his generosity. Steve was one of the main reasons why she had initially tried to make a go of living in London with Susie.

But times had mercifully changed, she reminded herself again. Steve had a steady girlfriend now. The passage of years had enabled them to return to their old friendship without undertones of what might have been complicating that relationship.

Mina jumped as Steve abruptly shouted, ‘Susie! Get out of there!’

Spinning round, Mina saw a huge terracotta pot wobble alarmingly. A dark little head and a pair of far from intimidated golden-brown eyes appeared over the lip of the pot. Her daughter said a very rude word, a word few mothers would be hardy enough not to cringe at, hearing it issuing from the rosebud mouth of a three-year-old.