A Savage Betrayal

Mina turned a beetroot colour and reached back for her coffee, any excuse to avoid looking at him again. But it really didn’t matter. He was etched in her mind’s eye anyway. Drop-dead gorgeous in faded tight jeans which clung to narrow hips and long, lean thighs, and a casual white polo shirt which hugged broad shoulders and a superbly muscular chest. He looked stunningly handsome…and one hundred per cent predator on the prowl.

‘You look spectacular,’ he murmured, his accent growling sexily along every syllable of the extraordinary assurance.

‘Spectacular’—with her hair on end, last night’s makeup probably blackening her eyes and teeth-marks in impossibly intimate places? Inwardly she cringed from her own weakness. There were degrees of susceptibility. Consummating their marriage was one thing. Throwing herself heart and soul into an orgy was another thing entirely.

She stole an upward glance and collided with another slow burning smile that was intimately redolent of the erotic memories tormenting her. Only itwas obvious that Cesare was not being tormented. He was quite visibly on a high. If he had brought out a bottle of champagne and uncorked it, she wouldn’t have been surprised.

‘Why are you smiling all of a sudden?’ Mina muttered suspiciously.

‘You want an honest answer?’

‘Last night about the only thing you didn’t threaten me with was a dungeon and chains!’

‘Celibacy doesn’t agree with me.’ Deep-set dark eyes rested on her with unconcealed satisfaction.

Mina lost her heady colour and gulped back cooling coffee in an effort to conceal how devastating she found that response. They were married and she didn’t feel married. She squinted at her bare finger, dimly recalled hurling the ring down the table down at him. She had no desire to go looking for that ring. It was the empty symbol of a relationship which did not exist on his side of the fence.

Cesare’s prime motivation had been acquiring his daughter. Since he had been quite honest about that from the outset, why had she married him still cherishing such naive expectations? Shouldn’t his behaviour before the wedding have been a sufficient warning of what lay ahead? Agonising as it was to face hard reality, she made herself face it. Cesare had only one use for her and it was a pretty basic one.

Weeks ago in London, he had said he would pay the price for her sexual favours and in the end the price had turned out to be marriage. Her skin chilled at that acknowledgement. He might not have wanted to marry her but right now Cesare thought he had it all. He had Susie, he had a convenient mother for Susie and he had an outlet for that shockingly high-powered sex drive of his. Little wonder that he was content with the current status quo. It demanded nothing from him.

She had less value than a mistress, none at all as a wife. Now that he had her stashed in the darkest depths of Sicily, he didn’t give a damn about her feelings or her needs. Why should he? He thought she was a moneygrubbing confidence trickster finally receiving her just deserts. No pain, no gain. That was the level on which that brooding Latin temperament of his functioned and in sharing a bed with him she betrayed her self-respect.

‘I also accept that you weren’t lying about Clayton,’ Cesare imparted lazily, as though he was merely mentioning it in an afterthought, golden eyes resting on her with unashamed gratification. ‘Whatever game you were playing with him, you weren’t sleeping with him.’

Flames of angry colour drenched her cheeks. So he finally believed her about something. But it was a case of too little too late. Indeed when she registered just how primitively pleased Cesare was by the knowledge that he had been her only lover, ironically she found herself wishing that she had kept her mouth shut.

He harboured a medieval streak of outright sexual possessiveness. She should have left him to stew in the pit of his own dark suspicions. He hadn’t deserved the truth but Mina’s essential honesty had betrayed her. Foolishly she had fallen in to the thankless habit of constantly defending herself, vainly struggling to establish a relationship which had a future with the man she loved…and where had it got her? she asked herself now.

‘How would you like to spend the day?’ he enquired, magnificently untouched by the bitter regrets attacking her.

‘Dressing in sackcloth and ashes and jumping off a cliff.’

‘That is not funny.’

‘I don’t feel funny…

I feel…’ Her voice wobbled. ‘I feel used and angry and very, very bitter!’

In despair, she thrust away the tray, slid out of bed and returned to her own room, for once indifferent to her own lack of clothing.

‘Mina…?’

‘Look, leave me alone!’ she slung back at him shakily, and vanished into the bathroom.

Well, her generosity had finally died, she told herself. Loving him didn’t mean she had to make a doormat of herself. If he wanted a marriage for Susie’s benefit, he could have a marriage for Susie’s benefit. She would be Susie’s mother but she would not be his wife. Why should she allow him to humiliate her? Had he ever done anything else? She was sick and tired of being attacked with sins she had not committed. Sick and tired of the pain, sick and tired of the wayward emotions which kept on making her a target for more pain. This was never going to be a normal marriage. Cesare was not going to wake up some day and magically believe that she was an innocent victim. He had destroyed the evidence which she might have been able to use «to establish her innocence. He had refused to listen to her. He had not once made the slightest effort to employ that brilliant mind on the startling idea that she might not be guilty as charged. Well, OK, fine…if that was how he was determined to play it, but Mina intended to embark on her own offensive.

She went downstairs an hour later, clad in denim Bermudas and a cerise tie blouse, both of which had retailed at chain-store prices. She had dumped every single scrap of the clothing he had bought her on the floor in his bedroom.

She ran Giulia to earth in a room off the vast kitchen and engaged her services as an interpreter so that she could invite Cesare’s housekeeper to show her round the castello. Paolo, who turned out to be Maria’s husband, officially took charge of the tour. With Giulia translating as best she could, Mina struggling to pick up the humble beginnings of a basic working vocabulary in Italian and everyone cheerfully correcting her pronunciation while answering her many questions, it was a lengthy but surprisingly enjoyable exercise.

‘So this is where you are.’

The animated conversation tailed away into silence. Mina’s amethyst eyes darkened and hardened on the sight of Cesare poised in the doorway. ‘I’ve been taking the official tour,’ she said.

‘I planned to show you round.’

‘As you see, it wasn’t necessary.’