Coercion to Love (5 page)

With that, and while he stood there rendered immobile by her flat-voiced vow, Cass turned and walked away, going to stand by the locked door, chin up, head l, tears of anger washing her eyes. ‘Does that mean you are prepared to do as I ask?'

Her disgust of him pulsed in the very air separating them as she said quietly, 'It means, Mr Valenti, that I want you to unlock this door so I can remove myself from your contaminated presence.' Green eyes challenged brown to take exception to her contempt, and for a moment she thought he would, his jerky movement enough to put her on her guard.

Then the eyes were hooding over again, and he forced himself to remain calm despite her provocation, a hand going into his pocket to find the keys as he walked smoothly towards her.

'You are on my territory now, Miss Marlow,' he reminded her as he reached around her to place the key in the lock, 'and I don't need the permission of a British court to keep Teresa here. I just do it. No mud-slinging— I simply kick you out of my valley and leave you to do battle with the Italian courts. Which means you having to find the time and the money to do it rather than me.'

Cass shuddered as the cold wind of truth wafted over her. But she refused to let him know it, turning to meet that challenge with all the bravery in her aching soul.

The key turned in the lock, and he opened the door, stepping back to allow her to leave. Cass did so with her head held high, refusing to say another word.

CHAPTER THREE

Terri was sitting up in bed when Cass entered the room. Clutched to her bosom was the big grey rabbit, and she was staring round-eyed between its two floppy ears at the large homely woman who sat chatting away to her in unintelligible Italian, and whose round face was wreathed with smiles.

'Who is she?' Terri asked curiously, seeming not in the least bit upset that she had woken in a strange bed in a strange room with this strange woman sitting beside her. 'Can't she speak English?'

'I don't know,' Cass said calmly. 'Why don't you ask her?'

So she did, hands clasped firmly around bunny's fat belly, eyes about as round as eyes could get. 'Do you speak English?' she enquired like any seasoned tourist.

The woman burst into a peel of laughter, thoroughly enjoying what she saw as a huge joke. 'A leetle,' she said, squeezing finger and thumb into a half-inch measure of her English ability. 'I Maria!' she then proudly announced.

Terri looked at the woman, then at her aunt, and informed her blandly, 'She's Maria,' as though Cass's own intelligence didn't stretch as far as her own. 'I'm Terri,' she informed Maria importantly. 'And that lady there is my aunt Cass.'

‘Ah, Teresa, eh?' Maria repeated expectantly, sending  a smiling nod of acknowledgement. 

‘Terri’ The child corrected impatiently.

'No, no, no,' Maria shook her jet-black head as she heaved her incredible weight out of the chair. 'Teresa— Teresa’ she insisted, and bent to plant kiss on Terri's cheek before waddling from the room with her happy laughter still shrill on her lips.

'She's nice!' she exclaimed, and, to an already emotionally tattered Cass, it was like having her only ally turn on her. 'Do you think she knows that horrid man?''

'No doubt.' Cass quelled the desire to smile in triumph. Maria might have won favour in Terri's eyes, but Carlo Valenti was still right out in the cold as far as his daughter was concerned. 'Since this is his house, and that is one of his beds you're sitting on, I should think she knows him very well.'

'Oh.' Not sure she liked the idea of that, the little girl let her eyes go on a curious scan of the room. Cass watched her with the ache in her heart turning to a throb. She looked so sweet sitting there like that, cuddling the great big rabbit, her little face all brown eyes, and the mop of unruly black curls tumbling in all directions. It was as though all that Italian breeding in her had suddenly leapt into startling life in the bright, gay luxury of the room. Big eyes moved and paused, moved and paused, taking in everything and revealing nothing.

'Had a nice nap?' Cass asked lightly when it became clear that Terri was not going to make a single remark about the room.

Terri didn't answer, flicking her a questioning glance instead. 'Where's that man?' she asked. 'I'm hungry. Do you think he'll feed us?'

'Oh, I should think so—if we can make ourselves presentable enough, that is,' she added, running a rueful eye over the child's disreputable state. 'How about a bath?' she suggested.

Terri shuddered. 'Ah, no, Cass!' she wailed predictably. 'I don't want a bath!'

With a threatening growl which set the small child giggling as she scrambled out of the bed and ran, Cass gave chase, letting the child run off some energy before catching and scooping her up in her arms to haul her off to the bathroom, unaware of how their playful laughter rang out beyond the closed suite door and into the room opposite, where Carlo Valenti sat behind his desk, his face carved in deep, still lines of thought.

The bathroom was big, stylish and inviting, with the same mixture of cream and green as in her own allotted room. A huge sunken bath held pride of place in the middle of the tiled floor, and the moment Terri saw it she changed her mind about a bath. Incredulous at the sheer size of it, she knelt at the side to watch eagerly the water gushing out from concealed taps set in the deep basin wall.

By the time she was stripped of her clothes and ready jump in, the bath was full, and, with a gleeful squeal, she landed fearlessly in the middle of the clear tepid water. Ten minutes later, and Cass had joined her, clothes and all, when a splashing contest had already drenched her anyway. And for the next half an hour they were just aunt and niece again, sublimely content with each other.

But the problems which faced Cass were never far away from her mind. And neither—she soon found out—were they from Terri's.

Wrapped in soft towelling robes they'd found hanging behind the bathroom door, one a bright sunshine-yellow,  other plain white, Cass was kneeling in front of Terri, lowing a comb through the child's shiny wet curls while all around them hung their wet clothes, dripping on to the fancy bathroom floor.

A small clean finger came up to trace a gentle pattern over Cass's cheek. 'Who is he?' Almost as though she knew the truth was going to rock her little world, Terri put the question with a deep and throbbing reluctance.

Cass swallowed, the tears backing up behind each other. So, she thought heavily, this is it. The moment she had been dreading for a year now.

Did she lie, or did she tell the truth?

'Who would you like him to be?' she fielded, knowing she had shied away from the answer the child deserved.

Small shoulders lifted and fell in an uncertain shrug, eyes the colour of dark chocolate, intent on watching the finger now busily tracing Cass's throat. 'He said he was my daddy, didn't he?'

So, Cass thought as her heart dropped sickeningly to her stomach, she had heard him claim her outside Giuseppe's garage. Cass had suspected as much. Terri so rarely missed anything going on around her. Damn you, Carlo Valenti!

'Well...' concentrating fiercely on the little girl's silky curls, Cass struggled for an answer '... if, let's say, he is your daddy, then would you be-too disappointed?'

The finger reached the deep 'V in the robe where moisture still clung to the honeyed gold of Cass's skin. 'He—he doesn't like me,' she said, her pouting mouth so vulnerable that Cass drew the little body close.

'Oh, but he does, darling!' she huskily assured, the tears hot in her eyes. 'He loves you so much that he's been trying to get to meet you for a whole year now, only—only...' she swallowed, and willed herself to finish it '...only I wouldn't let him,' she admitted.

There, she thought wretchedly. She couldn't come nearer to the truth than that!

'Why?' Terri stared at her in surprise.

'Because I'm selfish,' she said, and dragged her tongue from the cleaving roof of her mouth. 'Because I was greedy enough to want you all to myself. And because I was afraid that you may not like him, when really I should have left that decision up to you, shouldn't I?'

Smiling through the strains of her own distress, Cass was despairingly aware that almost every word she had said hit more at the truth than she'd actually ever dared admit to herself. Part of her flight from Carlo Valenti had been a personal flight because she needed Terri almost as much as the child needed her. But her hatred rf the man deepened further at his forcing her into having to say these things. Because she knew, as surely as night followed day, that, if things were in reverse, he would not have made the same sacrifice for her. And it had been a sacrifice, of all those memories she held so dear If Liz.

But, Liz or no, Carlo was Terri's father, and if the child wanted to accept him as that then there was very little she or anyone else could do about it.

'I'll always love you best, Cass!' the dear child vowed, as if she knew what was going around in Cass's mind, awl wanted to reassure her. 'Mummy first, then you, then—him. If I decide to like him, that is,' she tagged with a frown which revealed her own confusion. She had not forgotten the rude way he had snatched her from Cass's arms earlier.

'And—anyway,' she added offhandedly, 'he might not want me to love him. So we'll have to wait and see...'

Wait and see, Cass repeated bleakly to herself. How many times had she deflected Terri's questions with that phrase? 'How do you fancy combing the wet tangles out of my hair now?'

As a diversion tactic, it worked like a dream. But, as she sat cross-legged on the bed while Terri knelt behind her drawing the comb gently through her hair, her mood was heavy. From the moment she had looked across the  road outside Giuseppe's garage, and accepted that the man with the white Ferrari was indeed Carlo Valenti, she had feared that her time with Terri was drawing to an end.

The light knock at the suite door several long minutes later brought both females out of their personal engrossment. The sound was a mere slap at convention before he entered.

He had showered too, his dark hair combed wetly away from his lean shaped face. He had changed into a fresh set of clothes, the white loose-fitting shirt tucked into the slim waistband of a pair of casual trousers. He looked clean and alive, his presence alone seeming to shift the atmosphere in the room from the harmonious to the tense with nervous expectancy.

Closing the door behind him, he paused, his eyes narrowing on the two of them sitting on the bed with their shiny faces and guarded expressions, one so dark it threw the other into pure ethereal relief. A nerve twitched in his jaw, and something in his gaze as it rested on them made Cass quiver inside.

Terri was the first to break the stillness, climbing down from the bed to go and stand squarely in front of him. 'Cass said you'll feed us if we're clean,' she announced with her usual bluntness. 'So, we're clean.' She spread her small hands in what was a child's version of sarcasm. 'But we've got no clothes to put on 'cos you wouldn't let us get them from Giuseppe's.' She was doing it deliberately, testing him out with the insolent tone. 'And Cass has to wash the others in that big bath, so we can't get fed anyway!'

'There are plenty of clothes bought especially for you waiting in the drawers of your room, Teresa,' Carlo informed his daughter.

'My name is Terri,' she corrected. 'And that's not my room,' she denied. 'And those aren't my clothes in the drawers either. They belong to some other little girl, but they're not mine. Who do they belong to?'

Carlo threw Cass a sharp look. She stared balefully back. You're on your own in this one, Signore, that look told him. I've done all I'm going to do to help you.

Lashes so long and thick that they made his eyes look deceptively sleepy flickered then lowered as he shifted his gaze to her mouth. All at once she felt the pulsing reminder of a brutally issued kiss burn against her lips, and quickly lowered her eyes from him, appalled that be could offset her so easily.

‘They belong to my daughter,' he informed the waiting child.

Terri took a moment to absorb this, then said in her usual blunt way, which hid a lot of the real feelings which went on inside her, 'Do you love her?'

Oh, Terri, Cass thought wretchedly as she watched his hard mouth soften into a gentle smile.

'Does that room look as though it was made for a little girl who isn't loved?' he replied.

Terri just shrugged. 'I dunno,' she mumbled. 'I've not had a proper look at it yet.' Which was an outright lie because she had taken more than a 'proper' look at it.

Carlo hesitated a moment, as if unsure just what to do next, the lines about his long Roman nose starkly pronounced, revealing the real tension going on inside the man. Then he held out a hand towards her, the gesture tentative, like a man who was making his first approach to an uncertain animal. 'Shall we both go and take a look now?'

Terri looked at the hand, long-fingered and darkly booed, then at his face, smiling still and nowhere near hard as it had looked to her outside Giuseppe's garage.

Then she was looking back at the hand again, and her small one twitched before slowly, reluctantly almost,  up to settle in his. Cass watched his fingers close, and it felt as if thick steel bands were closing around her chest. She looked away, tears burning in her eyes, unable to take any more as jealousy, the likes of which she had never experienced in her life before, ripped right through her.

'Cass?' Terrri called to her.

She wet her dry lips, blinking fiercely before turning her head again. 'Yes?' she said huskily. Carlo's eyes were intent on her, and she knew he hadn't missed her pained response to this first voluntary move towards him by his daughter.

'You come too.' Terri held out her other hand, her small face set in a stubborn line.

It was Cass's turn to hesitate, not because she wanted to deny the little girl her support at this crucial moment, but because that earlier look from Carlo Valenti had made her uncomfortably aware of how naked she was beneath the brief white robe, and her hand went to clutch at the lapels in an unconscious give-away of her feelings, which made him smile knowingly.