Her Mediterranean Playboy (8 page)

‘You told me she stole that money from you,’ he said, the pieces of the puzzle finally falling into place. ‘But that is not what happened, is it, Rocco? You gave it to her, did you not? You gave it to her so she could—’

‘Excuse me…’ Ally inserted testily. ‘But do you mind speaking in English when I am in the room? I find it rather disconcerting to be left out of the conversation, since I suppose the discussion has everything to do with me.’

Rocco curled his lip. ‘You told him about the abortion, didn’t you?’ His cold gaze dipped to her flat stomach. ‘I assume you had it performed, as I insisted? I gave you enough money—more than enough, if the truth be known.’

Ally felt her belly contract in fear.
Oh, dear God
, she thought in anguish.
Don’t tell me this is what Alex has been through!
No wonder she had been so emotionally fragile, so close to the edge, as if nothing mattered any more—not even life itself. No wonder she had made such an unexpected attempt on her life.

‘No…’
Her voice came out on a strangled whisper. ‘No…oh, please…no,’ she said, the colour draining from her face. ‘How could you have asked that of…of…?’ She swayed and almost fell, her legs buckling beneath her.

Vittorio sprang to support her to the nearest chair, settling her into it and handing her a glass of water before he sent his brother-in-law a searing black glare that would have cut through a wall of diamonds. ‘Do you have
any
idea of what you have done, Rocco?’ he barked.

‘I gave her the money to get rid of it,’ Rocco said with no hint of remorse. ‘I was going to pay it back to the company. How could I have a pregnant mistress while my wife was giving every indication she was about to lose our baby? It was the only thing I could do, but this money-hungry bitch refused to comply. She threatened to go to the press and tell them about our “love-child”. I had to put a stop to it.’

Vittorio’s expression was livid. ‘So you told her to get rid of
the child and get out of your life? How did you convince her to do it, Rocco? Or shall I make another calculated guess?’

Rocco wiped his brow again, his throat moving up and down as his eyes flicked in Ally’s direction once again. ‘I…’ He paused. ‘I told her if she did not have the abortion then she would find herself in danger of getting hurt. I did not for a moment mean to follow through on the threat, but I was getting desperate.’

Ally’s head was still spinning. She could barely keep all her thoughts in some sort of order. They were like laser lights, randomly flashing off inside her head, making her feel sick to her stomach.

From the little she could string together, her sister had been coerced into having a termination. Ally knew her twin would have done anything to keep the man she loved—especially if she had been off her mood-stabilising medication. She wouldn’t have stopped to think of the consequences, or at least not until it was far too late to turn back the clock. And once she had realised there was no future in her relationship with Rocco, the enormity of what she had been forced to do had probably caused her mental breakdown. It all made sickening sense. Her sister had hinted at the terrible guilt that plagued her, but Ally hadn’t liked to delve too deeply until Alex was well enough to have a heart-to-heart with her face to face.

‘You have been a complete fool, Rocco,’ Vittorio said. ‘For the last ten minutes you have not even noticed you have been vilifying the wrong person.’

Rocco frowned in confusion. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Look at her,’ Vittorio commanded. ‘Look at her closely.’

Ally felt herself shrink into the French chair she was sitting on as both men turned their brown gazes on her stricken face.

‘I do not know what you are talking about,’ Rocco said, yet again wiping the beads of perspiration from his brow with his pocket handkerchief. ‘I can assure you that is Alexandra Sharpe. You only have to look at her passport to confirm it.’

‘That is exactly what I did do,’ Vittorio said, in a voice that sent a lightning bolt of shock through Ally.

He knew!

She sat up straighter in the chair, her eyes like saucers.

When had he found out?

Her heart clenched as she thought of the intimacy they had shared such a short time ago.

Why hadn’t he said anything?

She sat there, stunned. Perhaps not as stunned as Rocco, but certainly close. And she felt angry too.
Furiously
angry. Obviously Vittorio had been playing with her. For how long she didn’t know, but just an hour ago he had slept with her, knowing she wasn’t the person she had said she was.

Wasn’t
that
taking things way too far?

‘She…’ Rocco swallowed convulsively as he stared at Ally, bug-eyed. ‘She has a
double
?’

‘A twin sister,’ Vittorio informed him. ‘Alex is currently recovering in a Swiss clinic from a suicide attempt no doubt brought on by your disgusting demands on her. As it happens, Justina’s husband Sandro works with the doctor who treated her. Due to patient confidentiality there will be no leak to the press, so you can go home to Chiara before I feel tempted to do what I should have done a year ago and tell her what a two-faced creep you really are.’

Their conversation had slipped back into Italian; Ally couldn’t understand much of it even if she had wanted to. She felt an overwhelming need to get out of the
palazzo
and as far away from Vittorio Vassallo as she could. All she needed was her passport and she would be gone.

Ironically, it was Rocco who gave her the opportunity, by suddenly launching at Vittorio in a tirade of angry abuse. Thankfully neither of them noticed her slipping silently from the room.

‘H
OW
are you feeling?’ Ally asked her sister, delighted in the change in her appearance. Gone was the gaunt, hollow-eyed look of before, and in its place was a freshness of complexion. Her deep blue eyes were now clear and full of hope, instead of dark and empty with despair. She had even put on a tiny bit of weight. Not much, but enough to fill out her cheekbones, giving her a healthier look overall.

‘I am feeling much better,’ Alex said. ‘The counselling has been so helpful, and this new medication is making me feel much more normal. I will probably always feel bad about—’ She choked up for a moment before going on, ‘About the baby. But the counsellor has helped me accept it wasn’t my fault I had a miscarriage. It was nothing I did or didn’t do. The doctor told me one in four pregnancies ends in a miscarriage, but I don’t think I really heard him at the time. I would never have gone through with the abortion, but when I lost my baby I lost all hope of getting Rocco back. And yet now I can’t believe how dumb I was to imagine myself in love with someone so selfish.’

Ally’s gaze went to the door of her sister’s room, where a young man in a wheelchair was waiting patiently to spend time with Alex. Apparently they had struck up quite a relationship in the time Alex had been in the clinic. Andrew Claxton, a fellow Australian, had been injured in a road accident in which his best friend had died. Alex, in these last few days, had been one of his mainstays of support, putting her pain aside to help him cope with the slow climb back to reclaiming life.

It gave Ally much hope to see her sister concentrating on someone else’s issues instead of her own. It seemed to signal to her that the emotionally healing process Alex so desperately needed was now well on its way.

And as for hers?

Ally was still struggling to come to terms with Vittorio’s treatment of her. She felt used. She felt angry. And yet she knew a lot of the blame was her own. In her naïveté and inexperience she had stupidly fallen in love with him. And he had no doubt intended that to happen, in a twisted form of revenge for how she had deceived him.

Thinking back over their relationship, she found it hard to put an exact time on when he must have realised the truth. It made her cringe in embarrassment at the bare-faced lies she had told to his face. But some good had come out of it all, at least. According to the morning’s newspaper, Chiara had delivered a healthy little boy, seven weeks premature, but doing very well. There was some comfort in that, if nothing else. At least Vittorio’s mission had been accomplished.

He would soon forget all about his entanglement with her. In fact she wondered if he had spared a single thought for the woman who had spent just one magic, unforgettable moment—for her, at least—in his arms.

Ally gave herself a stern talking-to. He had spent many such magic moments with women much more experienced than she; he was probably congratulating himself that he had avoided a very public scene by her leaving without a fuss. He had made no effort to contact her, which suggested he had no intention of continuing their affair.

Alex was still holed up with Andrew an hour or so later when Ally next came to visit, so she retreated to the extensive gardens instead. Even though it was now close to the end of September, the leaves were only just turning to amber and red-gold hues. They fluttered to the ground at her feet in what seemed a halfhearted attempt to make way for autumn and then winter.

She heard the crunch of leaves under someone’s feet and, ex
pecting to see Alex’s therapist, who often sought her out on her walks in the grounds, she was totally shocked to see the tall figure of Vittorio standing there.

‘Hello, Alice,’ he said.

She arched one brow at him. ‘Don’t you mean Ally?’ she asked with a guarded look.

‘You are one and the same, are you not?’ he returned.

She turned away and kicked at some crunchy leaves with her foot. ‘I can’t imagine why you are here—other than to gloat over how you played me for a fool.’

‘Is that not what I should be saying to you?’ he countered.

She swung back round to look at him, her eyes blazing. ‘You didn’t have to sleep with me. That was taking things
too
far. I only did what I did to find out what had happened between Rocco and my sister. She wouldn’t tell me all the details, and I couldn’t find out any other way. I didn’t expect you to seduce me. That was about as low as you could go, considering how…how I felt about you.’

‘How
do
you feel about me?’

She glared at him. ‘How do you
think
I feel about you?’

He waited a beat or two before asking, ‘Do you love me?’

The question caught her totally off guard. She stood looking at him, her eyes as wide as dinner plates, her heart beating as heavily as a bass drum, her stomach tipping and tilting as she saw the glint of desire burning in his coal-black eyes.

‘W-what sort of question is that?’ she managed to croak, her heart still doing crazy back-flips in her chest.

‘I need to know.’

‘Why?’

‘Because everything depends on it.’

‘Your business, you mean?’ she said with an embittered look. ‘You do realise all I have to do is call Paolo Lombardi and tell him what a creep his godson is, don’t you? Don’t think I won’t, because I tell you I’m sorely tempted to do so. And he would be appalled to hear of how you used me so despicably. I know I could convince him to remove his portfolio from your account. He has a lot of respect for me.’

‘That will not be necessary,’ Vittorio said. ‘As soon as I realised you worked for the Australian branch of his company I spoke to him about my concerns over Rocco. I thought Paolo had the right to know what was going on, in case it somehow got out in the press. We had a long discussion, and as a result I have decided to terminate Rocco’s position in my company.’

Ally frowned. ‘But what about Chiara?’ she asked. ‘She’s just had a baby. She’ll be feeling so vulnerable right now.’

‘Chiara is not as naïve as I thought,’ Vittorio said. ‘It seems she has regretted her marriage from day one, and once she has recovered from the birth she is going to ask for a divorce. It is the wake-up call Rocco needs. He will either turn his life around or continue along the destructive path he has chosen.’

‘And what about what you did to me?’ Ally asked with a frosty glare.

He blew out a sigh and shoved back his wayward fringe with his right hand. ‘I am sorry I did not tell you I knew who you were when I initially found out. You left your handbag in the car that first day. When Beppe brought it in he dropped it in the foyer, and amongst the things that fell out was the money Rocco had insisted you had stolen. I was furiously angry, and was about to come back upstairs to have it out with you when I saw your passport on the floor at my feet. I picked it up, and of course one glance confirmed my suspicions.’

Ally wanted to be furious with him for allowing her to continue her charade while he had no doubt been laughing behind her back, but somehow she felt as if he had more to explain, so remained silent.

‘From that point on I was concerned that Rocco was not giving me the complete story of his involvement with your sister,’ he went on. ‘I had no idea he had insisted she have a termination. Nor did I know about the threats he made towards her. I can hardly believe he would do such a thing. He was even prepared to see her face the authorities over the money he gave her. One assumes he hoped no one would believe her version of events. What he did was unforgivable. I cannot think about it without wanting to throttle him.’

Ally touched him on the arm, which stopped him in his tracks. ‘She didn’t have an abortion,’ she said, looking up at his tortured and so beloved features. ‘She lost the baby before she went through with his demand. She was off her medication. She has a condition…I don’t want to go into the details now, but without regular medication she doesn’t always act rationally. I think meeting your brother-in-law and what ensued was part of what led to a breakdown. She is on the mend now. She has even met someone who is clearly in love with her for who she is—which is what she needs right now more than anything.’

He cupped her cheek with the warmth of his palm. ‘Is that not what everyone needs?’ he asked, looking down at her adoringly. ‘To be loved and accepted for who they really are?’

Ally’s heart began to flutter about in her chest. ‘I—I’m not sure what you’re saying…’

He smiled and brushed the pad of his thumb across the cushion of her bottom lip, where the tip of her tongue had so recently passed. ‘You could have ruined me. You had the chance in your hands and yet you did not do so. You said it yourself just now. All you had to do was talk to Paolo Lombardi and ask him to withdraw every single euro he has invested with me, and yet you did not. Why did you not take your revenge on me while you had the chance?’

Ally moistened her dry lips again, and raised her eyes to his. ‘Because I don’t believe in hurting the people I love,’ she said. ‘It’s sort of my life’s credo.’

‘You love me, Alice Benton?’ he asked, his eyes suddenly misting over. ‘Enough to marry me as soon as it can be arranged?’

She blinked at him in surprised delight. ‘You really mean it?’

‘Am I not doing a good enough job of proposing,
tesore mio
?’ he asked with a self-deprecating smile. ‘Do I need to find some other way of convincing you I am for real?’

She gave him a pert little smile in return. ‘Perhaps you could run by me those fringe benefits you mentioned a few days ago? I seem to remember they were pretty convincing at the time.’

His eyes danced with amusement. ‘It will be my pleasure,’ he said, and kissed her passionately and lingeringly until her head was spinning.

He lifted his mouth from hers after a few breathless minutes and asked, ‘Now will you agree to marry me? Or do I have to kiss you again?’

Ally smiled as she hugged him tightly around the waist. ‘Yes, I will certainly marry you. I love you, Vittorio Vassallo. I love, love,
love
you.’

He brought his mouth back down to the soft bow of hers. ‘Then I think it is time you called me Vito,’ he said, and sealed her mouth with a kiss that totally blew her mind.