He took her back to the apartment before the intermission. The silence between them was like a great glass wall and she was too drained to try and climb it. She vanished into her bedroom without a word and tore off the finery he had chosen to frame her in before he smashed her down. She had never been so hurt that she physically ached, but she did now as she crawled naked into the bed like a wounded animal seeking sanctuary. She heard the thud of the front door shutting on his departure and then the dam burst again. He had brought it all back, opening up scars that had yet to heal.

‘Ashley, please…’ She was startled into a scream when a hand brushed aside the tangle of hair concealing the face she had buried in the pillow to muffle her sobs. ‘Go a-away!’ she sobbed.

The mattress gave under the onslaught of his weight. ‘I was callous and sadistic. I was a total bastard. I admit it. I wanted to hurt you-‘

‘You did,’ she gasped. ‘Now go away and let me do my grieving in private.’

‘In all the time we were together four years ago, I never once saw you cry. And now twice in a week…’ His roughened voice broke off. ‘You were always so tough-‘

‘I used to cry in the b-bathroom with the shower running.’

Vito loosed a laugh utterly devoid of humour. ‘I wish I’d known.’

‘You would have revelled in it,’ she mumbled, and sat up, scrunching the sheet defensively round her and concealing her swollen face below the veil of her tousled hair. ‘I thought you’d gone…’

‘I couldn’t leave you like this. I came back.’ He slotted a brandy into her hand and she drank it down like a Cossack about to go into battle. The alcohol eased the ache in her throat but she still refused to look at him.

He laced long fingers into her hair and tipped up her face, preventing her retreat. ‘We’re getting married in ten days’ time and then I have a six-week vacation which we will spend in Sri Lanka.’ She trembled at the implacability she met in his fierce dark eyes. Other emotions were beginning to surface from beneath the crushing weight of feeling she had given vent to. No wonder he had called her a whore that first day in his office. Only a woman worthy of that name would have behaved as he believed she had four years ago and again today. He had talked about abortion as though she were so without female sensitivity that such a choice would have meant absolutely nothing to her. Hatred surged in a hot, reviving rush through the cracks he had made in her composure. Loathing at his injustice began to crackle in a series of little fires fed by bitter resentment. He had married another woman, yet he reserved the right to stand in judgement over her for almost making a choice that many women would have made in her position. The guilt she had long borne burnt out forever in that moment. The urge to clear her name that had weakened her response to his bitter prejudice earlier vanished entirely. He hadn’t even asked if the child was his. Presumably he thought she couldn’t possibly know whether it had been or not. So now she had it all. The truth as Vito saw it, and the motivation behind his coercion.

If he had not loved her, he had certainly been physically obsessed by her. Unsuitable as she was, he had stayed with her five months and he had asked her to marry him. The sensation of what he had termed an ‘entirely superficial hurt’ to his male pride had been a masterful understatement which appearances could no longer sustain. Her refusal to marry him four years ago must have absolutely devastated him, and the belief that she had immediately turned to another man had added an entire chapter to that devastation. The savagery with which he had condemned her had been revealing. Carina clearly hadn’t managed to soothe that rawness. Evidently only the most bitter of revenge scenarios was capable of taking away that slur on his manhood.

‘Is it possible for us to start again?’ The abrasive demand was literally wrenched from him as he stared down at her, a tiny pulse pulling at the taut edge of his wide mouth. ‘This is not how I meant it to be.’

‘Blood and gore every five minutes? Why don’t you just arrange for me to have an accident?’ Ashley enquired shakily. ‘It would be so much quicker and cleaner.’

The long brown fingers knotted into the fiery strands of her hair. The ferocity of his brilliant gaze stabbed into her like a knife. ‘Hate and love are but two sides of the same coin.’

‘You’d better watch out, then. This much hate comes uncomfortably close to manic obsession,’ she muttered, her breath tripping in her dry throat.

‘And you should know why,’ Vito traded, his fingers tightening with the raw tension that smouldered from him.

In his grip, she gave a tiny compulsive shudder, suddenly becoming alarmingly aware of the intimacy of their surroundings combined with her nudity and his white-hot sexual temperament. The vibrations in the atmosphere were shooting round her like invisible lightning bolts, making it incredibly hard for her to breathe. ‘Because I said no? Because I had the incredible bad taste to find another man?’ she threw at him in provocative intent, hoping to douse the dark flames of arousal in his intent stare.

Vito didn’t even flinch. True, a momentary gravity tightened his facial muscles, but the idea that she had so swiftly sought consolation was evidently so ingrained that she could not shock him. ‘Because I loved you,’ he grated, and she was the one most inconveniently shocked by that confession. ‘You look surprised, but why should you? Do you really believe that lust rejected would still incite me to such violence?’ He ran the fingertips of his other hand up along the line of her extended throat in a caressing gesture that was curiously chilling. ‘Love? I believed it couldn’t happen to me. I had given up all hope of it ever happening. I was twenty-eight years old and, in many ways, older than my years. And then one night I saw you on a dance floor and I wanted you more than anything I had ever wanted in my life…’

Ashley was trembling, curiously unwilling to accept the truth of what she had once believed. ‘Infatuation,’ she said fiercely. ‘And it burnt out for both of us.’

‘But this didn’t…’ One forceful hand welding to her taut spine, Vito lowered his dark head. His breath fanned her cheek and then he let his teeth nip playfully at the soft fullness of her lower lip, soothing the tiny assault with the teasing tip of his tongue until involuntarily her mouth opened, inviting a deeper invasion.

The hard heat of his body against hers was a powerful enticement. Tiny little quivers of sexual tension were awakening at every pressure-point where his lean muscles were in contact with her softer curves. Ashley began to shake, struggling to deny and to fight the insidious weakness stealing through her limbs. She could stop this, she would stop this, the little voice in her head screamed. He could not force her into intimacy. But a curious weighted stasis was holding her still in his embrace as though she was waiting for a hurricane warning before she could actually act in her own defence.

‘No… no, not this!’ Her voice was hoarse with the effort it took to break the spell. He clenched both her hands in his and held her back from him before she could take a single evasive movement. His intent gaze smouldered over her. As she glanced down at herself, she saw the revealing thrust of her nipples against the fine percale sheet still draped across her breasts, and her translucent skin burned with the heat of her own betrayal.

A dark flush accentuated the harsh set of his features. ‘If you can’t live without a man, that man might as well be me,’ he grated roughly.

Fury speared through that all-pervasive physical frailty. Between clenched teeth, she spat, ‘If rape turns you on, go ahead!’

A glimmer of black humour softened the hard set of his sensual mouth. ‘How you do love to dramatise yourself. Why can’t you be honest about this at least? You saw me for the first time in four and a half years last week and within minutes you were hot all over, eating me with your eyes.’ Outraged, Ashley shrieked, ‘That’s a filthy lie!’