Second-Time Bride

Alessio extended the phone without a word.

‘How are you guys getting on?’ Tara chattered. ‘I knew you’d be worried sick about me because this is the first time I’ve been away.’

‘Yes—’

‘Isn’t Dad romantic taking you back to where you first met?’ Tara gushed. ‘I bet you were really knocked flat by that.’

‘Yes—’

‘Well, I’m fine and I’m having a whale of a time, so I hope you won’t mind me not ringing again...’ Her daughter’s voice dropped very low before she continued, ‘Sorry, but it looks really naff having to phone home.’

Seconds later, Daisy returned the phone to Alessio. He tossed it aside. A gulf of silence stretched and Daisy’s brow furrowed when Alessio made no move to pull her back into his arms. Her still heated body tautened and flushed with guilty acknowledgement of her own lingering and intense arousal.

‘I thought my memories might have been coloured by adolescent fantasy but they weren’t.’ His dark, deep voice flat with a curious lack of expression, Alessio cast her a sudden chillingly cold glance from below spiky black lashes, his brilliant dark gaze bleak and hard. Springing lithely off the bed, he reached for his shirt. ‘You really are dynamite in bed...but I think I’ll take a rain check.’

Daisy’s face flamed with shock and humiliation. That rejection slashed like a winter wind across her exposed flesh. She tugged the sheet over herself, her fingers bone-white as she clenched them beneath its cover. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ she heard herself whisper strickenly.

Alessio swung back to her, his dramatically handsome features taut. His wide, sensual mouth twisted. ‘I’m still very angry with you. Every time I remember that you took my daughter away from me, it makes me want to smash things. But I’ll get over that. It’s irrational to expect more from you than you are capable of giving and it’s impossible to turn the clock back.’

Ill-prepared for that level of frankness, Daisy flinched. He had hidden that anger so well from her that she had been fooled. Now, when her every defence was down he condemned her with that reminder, throwing her into guilty confusion. ‘You’re not being fair.’

Alessio’s screened gaze closed in on her and lingered in cool appraisal, his detachment somehow making her even more painfully aware of her nudity beneath the sheet. ‘On the contrary, I am being very fair. You’re a remarkably good mother. You’re gorgeous and sexy and great in bed.’

Daisy bent her head, burning pink invading her cheeks afresh. But not so sexy and not so great that he couldn’t still walk away, she thought, in an agony of mortification and self-loathing.

‘That you should also be a little greedy and emotionally shallow is no big deal,’ Alessio added grimly.

Her head flew up. ‘I am not greedy...and I am not shallow!’

‘Daisy, you have the staying power of a butterfly.’

‘That’s not true!’

‘It’s not important.’ In the thundering silence, Alessio shrugged with an air of arrogant finality. ‘If it wasn’t for Tara, we wouldn’t be here now.’

‘I don’t need you to tell me that.’ He was only confirming what she had already known, what she had inexplicably allowed herself to forget over the past halfhour. Yet the reminder made Daisy feel incredibly empty and degraded. The intimacy she had foolishly believed they had recaptured had only been an illusion, born of her own stupid sentimentality and sexual hunger. She hated herself for that weakness. She wanted to lie down and die, but not in front of him.

Without warning, Alessio strode over to the door and flung it wide, an impatient frown drawing his black brows together. ‘I think we have a visitor.’

‘A visitor?’ Daisy repeated in bewilderment.

A female voice echoed through the upper reaches of the villa, the distant tap-tap of stiletto heels sounding on the marble staircase, telegraphing their wearer’s impatience.

‘Bianca,’ Alessio breathed, already moving out into the corridor to intercept his sister.

Daisy paled. ‘But how on earth did she get in?’ she gasped. ‘Through a window on a broomstick?’