Second-Time Bride (12 page)

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Authors: Lynne Graham

BOOK: Second-Time Bride
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Daisy regarded the ring on her finger with a heart that sank, and then looked up. ‘You're trying to manage me. I don't like being managed. I don't like being married either,' she added helplessly.
‘We have only been married for five hours.' A slow, teasing smile curved Alessio's sensual mouth as he gazed down at her.
It was the most genuine smile that Alessio had given her over the past week but Daisy was even more chilled by the charismatic approach. Tara smiled just the same way when she was after something—usually something that cost two arms and a leg. ‘Five hours feels like long enough.'
‘When a challenge comes knocking on the front door, you're already halfway out the back, aren't you? You're faster on your feet than a greyhound!' Alessio censured her grimly as he bent down and without the smallest warning scooped her bodily out of her seat. ‘You've done that from the first night we met, right through our marriage and out of it again, and you were still doing it this week when you bolted from the bank. But there'll be no escape
this
time, I assure you.'
‘What do you think you're doing?' she gasped, unnerved by his behaviour.
‘What I should have done an hour ago. You're suffering from sleep deprivation.' Alessio laid her down on the bed in the cabin. ‘Trying to talk to you now is like trying to talk to a drunk. I am getting nowhere fast. And it's all my own fault.
Mea culpa
. I employed every device I could to nail you. I leant on your conscience. I crowded you. Your weaknesses were my strengths. I admit it. Does that make you feel better?'
Dumbstruck, Daisy stared up at him.
Alessio sank down on the edge of the mattress and calmly took off her shoes. ‘One bad week and we're married. What's one bad week?'
‘It was fourteen the last time... hell on earth—'
‘It was not hell on earth.
Dio
, give me strength!' Alessio growled, searing her with exasperated eyes. ‘So we had a few problems... OK? But it wasn't all my fault. You changed. All of a sudden you were creeping about like Little Orphan Annie, looking all wounded and pathetic.'
‘You stopped talking to me.'
‘I wasn't talking to anyone.
‘You could have talked to me.'
‘You couldn't have handled it. You were blissfully oblivious to the fact that life as I knew it had gone down the tubes.' A wry smile twisted his well-shaped mouth and then faded again. ‘Superficial things that shouldn't have mattered to me
did
matter then. My friends thought it was hilarious when you ended up pregnant. In fact, they thought it was the funniest thing they had ever heard. Alessio had finally got caught.'
Daisy winced and paled. ‘I didn't know that.'
‘And anything
but
marriage would have been cool in my circle. I wasn't very good at laughing at myself at nineteen. One day I was a social lion, the next a hermit... and then on top of that I had Vittorio trying to act the heavy father for the first time at the wrong time... you weeping over me, my mother weeping over me, Bianca weeping over me. You're right,' Alessio suddenly breathed, with the faintly dazed air of one making a long-unacknowledged admission. ‘It
was
sheer bloody hell.'
Daisy flipped over and looked at the wall. Her eyes stung, her mouth quivered. He was finally agreeing that their first marriage had been a nightmare. She felt astonishingly ungrateful for that agreement. Why was it that she should now recall odd little moments when the sheer hell seemed worth it? She was being very perverse. And at seventeen she must have been appallingly self-centred not to appreciate that Alessio might be suffering just as much as she was, if not more...
As she lay there, Daisy saw the past slowly rearrange itself along less familiar but perhaps more realistic lines, and it was not a pleasant experience. Alessio might have changed towards her but hadn't she also changed towards him? The sunny romantic he had shared that summer with had turned into a weepy wet blanket. She
had
been a complete pain. Wasn't it time she admitted that? Out of her own emotional depth and feeling painfully insecure, she had needed the kind of constant reassurance that no teenage boy would have been capable of giving her.
Alessio had not been deliberately punishing her. He had been getting by the only way he could. He had even tried to protect her by keeping quiet about his own problems. His friends laughing at him...Daisy shrank from that image, remembering with aching clarity just how proud Alessio had been then. It must have taken real guts to marry her in the face of that cruel adolescent mockery. His friends would have been far more impressed if he had given her the money for a termination and put her on the next flight back to London. She swallowed back the thickness ballooning in her throat.
And if Alessio had blamed
her
for just about everything that had gone wrong between them, hadn't she been guilty of doing the exact same thing to him? When had she ever looked back and acknowledged that she had made mistakes too? She had dug her head into the sand and hoped and prayed that their problems would magically melt away. Paralysed by the fear that she was losing him, she had done nothing constructive either, she reflected with growing discomfiture.
‘Alessio...?' Daisy whispered thickly, and then, frowning, she turned her head.
But Alessio had already gone, leaving her alone. Just as quickly the past lost the power to hold her. It was the present which was tearing her apart. Alessio could freely admit to having forced her back into marriage and yet his conscience remained clear. In his view, she had committed a far greater sin in denying him all knowledge of his child. And as Tara's mother she was merely a useful adjunct to Alessio's desire to have full custody of his daughter. As a woman, as a wife, she didn't count.
With that depressing thought, Daisy fell asleep.
 
A hand on her shoulder shook her half-awake. Daisy focused blearily on the photo album lodged mere inches in front of her face.
‘Who is that?' Alessio enquired, a lean finger indicating the male standing beside her and a three-year-old Tara in one of the photos.
Daisy made an effort to concentrate. ‘That was George—'
‘And this character?' Alessio flipped over a page.
Daisy focused uncertainly on another male face. ‘Daniel... I think.'
Another page turned. A giant yawn crept up on her as she peered at the handsome blond man whom Alessio was now indicating. She looked blank. ‘I don't remember him—'
‘You don't remember him? I'm not surprised!' Alessio blistered down at her, making her jump in shock. ‘Tara gave me six albums. Every one of them is full of strange men! You could run an international dating agency out of the male contingent in your photographs!'
Daisy gazed up at him with wide, drowsy eyes filled with incomprehension.
‘Tara told me that you didn't date, that you hardly ever went out...'
Daisy's sleepy eyes opened even wider. She was shocked that her daughter could have told such a whopper. She had always enjoyed a reasonably healthy social life.
With a not quite steady hand, Alessio snapped the offending album shut. ‘I suspected a certain amount of exaggeration on that point.' Scorching golden eyes raked her small, sleep-flushed face accusingly. ‘But I had
no idea
what she was covering up! What about the toy boy?'
‘Toy boy?' Daisy repeated dazedly, hanging on every explosive word that emerged from between his bloodless, compressed lips.
‘He was the latest, wasn't he?' Alessio surveyed her with sudden, icy derision, anger reined in as his expressive mouth clenched as hard as a vice. ‘
Dio
...you've been sleeping around ever since you divorced me!'
As the door slammed on his exit, Daisy's jaw dropped. Sleeping around? Was he crazy? Sex had just about wrecked her life at seventeen and she had learnt that lesson well. Casual intimacy was not for her. She might have had no shortage of male company over the years but she had never fallen in love again—hadn't wanted to either, she acknowledged honestly—and it had always seemed easier to end relationships when they'd demanded more than she'd been prepared to give.
Janet, she reflected drowsily, might say that she had a fear of commitment that amounted to paranoia, but she herself thought that she had been very sensible. No man had caused her grief in thirteen years. She was proud of that record and not at all proud of the fact that she had been a mass of painful and grieving nerve-endings from the instant that Alessio had come back into her life.
 
Daisy shifted in voluptuous relaxation. The bed was very comfortable. Memory slowly stirred. A slight frown-line divided her brows. She had the oddest recollection of a meal being thrust under her nose when being forced to stay awake had felt like the cruellest torture. She had
pleaded
for the mercy of a bed.
And had Alessio really said, ‘If you don't eat, you don't sleep,' and cut up a steak into tiny, bite-sized pieces while her head had sunk back down on the supporting heel of her hand and her eyelids had kept on closing no matter how hard she tried to keep them open? He had been so damnably domineering, but the chocolate gateau which had come next had melted in her mouth and for the first time in a week her stomach had felt settled instead of queasily empty.
They were in Italy... and Alessio was smouldering again but, unhappily,
not
in silence, she thought as she recalled that scene with the photo album. At nineteen, Alessio had told her that a boy who slept around was only gaining necessary masculine experience but that a girl who slept around was a tart. That might not be fair but that was life, he had informed her cheerfully. But Alessio could not find it within himself to be quite so cheerful now about the idea that he might have
married
a tart.
Daisy might have told the reassuring truth had she been asked, but she hadn't been asked. Alessio was not prone to demanding direct answers on sensitive subjects. He was naturally devious. Being sneaky had put him into the hands of his equally sneaky daughter. Tara, bless her scheming and shrewd little Leopardi brain, had worked out exactly what her father wanted to hear and had given it to him in spades. Daisy felt no pity for Alessio. Her sex life... or indeed her lack of a sex life...was none of his business.
But, for her daughter's sake, she had to make the best of this crazy marriage, she told herself staunchly. Thankfully, she was
not
the sort of female who made a six-act tragedy out of a broken cup, contrary to Alessio's opinion. She lifted her feathery lashes and then froze. A stricken gasp was torn from her. All languor banished, Daisy jackknifed upright, her horrified gaze flying round the eerily familiar contours of the spacious room.
Vacating the bed in a flying leap, she wrenched back the curtains with impatient hands and looked out in disbelief at the formal gardens spread out below. Boxshaped parterres adorned with statures and fountains and huge planted stone urns ran up to the edges of a magnificent oak wood. Beyond the trees stretched the rolling verdure of the Tuscan hills.
The very first time Daisy had seen that magnificent view, she had been under the naive impression that she was having a guided tour of the palatial Leopardi summer home. Alessio's parents had generally been in residence only at weekends. Daisy had been hugely intimidated by her luxurious surroundings. Having got her off balance, Alessio had easily overcome her shy, uncertain protests by smoothly locking his mouth to hers in heated persuasion and sweeping her off to bed to deprive her of her virginity...
But not before assiduously assuring her that he would not go one step further than she wanted him to, that she had only to say no and he would immediately stop. Daisy hadn't been capable of vocalising a single word in the flood of passion which had followed. Alessio would naturally have worked that fact out beforehand. Even as a teenager, he had been ruthlessly well acquainted with her every weakness.
Daisy finally spun from the window and back into the present; trembling with outrage and discomfiture. How dared Alessio bring her back to the family villa in Tuscany? How could any man be so insensitive that he didn't appreciate that this was the very last place she would want to revisit? This was where they had fallen in love, where they had played adult games of passion, blithely risking consequences that neither of them had been equipped to deal with.
She was standing beneath the shower in the adjoining bathroom before it occurred to her that thirteen years ago that bedroom had been
his
bedroom. Of course it wouldn't still be his, she thought, scolding herself furiously for the fact that her impressionable heart had just skipped an entire beat. Instead of being clenched by horror, she had been clenched by excitement, she conceded with deep chagrin. But she would never allow herself to succumb to the potent lure of Alessio's allpervasive sexuality again. A healthy distance and detachment would provide the only safe and sensible foundation for a marriage of convenience.

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