Second-Time Bride (16 page)

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Authors: Lynne Graham

BOOK: Second-Time Bride
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‘I... beg... your... pardon?' Daisy gasped, devastated that he should already be harbouring such a suspicion.
‘You want me every bit as much as I want you ... and only this way could you have me without admitting that fact. Manna from heaven!' Alessio repeated with provocative bite as he dumped her down on the bed.
‘That's an absolutely ridiculous accusation!' Daisy struggled to sound convincingly incredulous but she had turned scarlet.
‘And since nothing will convince me that you don't want me ... mutual lust being instantly recognisable ... I can't understand why you're still running in the wrong direction!' Alessio delivered with savage candour. ‘What more do you want from me? What does it take for me to get some co-operation? Do I need to tell you that there is a string of credit cards and a monthly allowance that would keep an oil sheikh happy waiting for you?'
Daisy paled and swallowed hard at the degrading suggestion that money might make her more amenable. Suddenly, playing the role of gold-digger who had gone out with a big unfeeling bang during their first marriage no longer felt like a source of secret amusement or a clever defence mechanism. Maybe it was time she told Alessio the truth about that financial settlement. She worried at her lower lip, feeling threatened by the prospect of even telling Alessio that much. But how could it hurt? At least he wouldn't be able to call her mercenary again!
‘And the sound of your silence will not get us anywhere fast!' Alessio bit out.
Daisy cleared her throat awkwardly but Alessio had already vanished into the bathroom. In an abrupt movement, she yanked up two pillows and placed them carefully in a defensive line down the centre of the bed.
Alessio hit the mattress and the barrier simultaneously. He sat up again and vented an expletive in Italian. ‘Sometimes you are so bloody childish...'
‘It is not childish of me to believe that our relationship will work best if we sleep apart,' Daisy protested shakily. ‘And, by the way, I am not greedy and grasping and I never was!'
An expectant hush fell.
‘Is that the end of this astonishing rush of confidence?' Alessio probed drily.
Colouring with annoyance, Daisy breathed in deep and forced herself onward, telling herself that it would be very much to her advantage to embarrass him with the truth. She tilted her chin. ‘Your father persuaded Janet to accept that settlement on my behalf. She put it in a Swiss bank account and she didn't tell me it was there until last week.'
‘Madre di Dio
...' Alessio breathed in a shaken surge of comprehension, his deep voice fracturing. A split second later he attempted to breach the pillows but Daisy was ready for that eventuality.
She rolled out of bed and took up a defensive stance. ‘So you can stop calling me greedy, and I don't need your credit cards or your lousy allowance because that settlement would keep Tara and me in comfort for the rest of our days!'
‘You weren't lying when you said you didn't take a penny when you divorced me...' Spiky black lashes swept up to reveal shrewd, questioning eyes of gold as he surveyed her with intense interest and none of the embarrassment she had expected. ‘So at what stage did you decide that you preferred me to think that you
were
greedy and grasping? What were you trying to cover up?'
Chagrined pink flooded Daisy's small face. The speed with which Alessio could assimilate new information and dissect it horrified her. ‘I...I—'
‘Then you genuinely did think that you were doing me a favour by divorcing me and keeping quiet about Tara,' Alessio reflected out loud. ‘Daisy the martyr—now that does have a far more convincing ring of reality. You let my father bully you into the divorce, didn't you?' He drove a not quite steady hand through his luxuriant black hair and looked heavenwards, his strong jawline set fiercely hard.
The silence grew and lingered until her tension seemed to scream beneath its weight.
‘Daisy... were you still in love with me when you divorced me?' Alessio enquired in a tone of the utmost casualness.
The silence was like the clash of cymbals in Daisy's ears. She was appalled. One little thing, just one little thing she had confessed, and within the space of a minute he was sprinting for the finishing line.
‘Gosh, I'm so tired,' she mumbled round a fake yawn, desperate fingers splayed to conceal her hot, discomfited face.
‘Come back to bed,' Alessio purred in husky invitation. ‘I'll wake you up fast.'
Involuntarily, Daisy hovered, violet eyes wide, a vulnerable prey to the lure of him. She thought of his hands on her body and a shiver of raw excitement coursed through her. A hungry need that she could not withstand held her fast. Why not give him the chance to prove that
his
way could work? an insidious voice murmured in the back of her mind.
‘I won't risk another pregnancy,' Alessio imparted with measured emphasis. ‘Is that what is worrying you? I don't want another child.'
And instantly that voice in Daisy's mind was silenced. A curious pain stabbed through her in its wake. Surely more children should at least have been a possibility in the normal marriage which Alessio had said he wanted? Yet he'd cooly dismissed the idea of extending the family before it could even arise.
In an abrupt movement, her every suspicion as to his marital intentions reawakened, Daisy grabbed at the light quilt lying at the foot of the bed. Beneath Alessio's utterly incredulous gaze, she wrapped herself within its folds and curled up in a comfortable armchair.
CHAPTER NINE
I
N DAISY'S dream, the most perfect baby in the world lay before her, unclaimed. She was in the very act of eagerly reaching out to take possession when a pair of cruel, unfeeling hands got there first. ‘I said
no.'
Alessio's voice intervened in icy disapproval and the seductive vision of sweet-smelling, lovable baby vanished.
Daisy woke up with tears trapped in her throat. A maid was pulling back the curtains. She was in bed but she was alone. She had a hazy recollection of briefly, blissfully snuggling into masculine arms
and
of the moan of distress which had escaped her when she had been released all too quickly into the cool embrace of a sheet. Her cheeks reddened fiercely. How long would it be before Alessio appreciated that she ran in the wrong direction only because she couldn't trust herself too close? Or did he already appreciate that?
As for that stupid dream, she thought painfully, she hadn't realised just how much she would love another baby until Alessio had announced that there wasn't going to be one. She had experienced a deep sense of rejection. Her distrust and insecurity had taken over again. One unpleasant fact stared her in the face. If there
was
any truth in the suggestion that Alessio might be looking on their marriage as only a temporary expedient, a second child would definitely be on the forbidden list.
Even so, within twenty-four hours of remarriage, Alessio had still turned her every conviction inside out. Yesterday she had hidden behind her pride but last night she had made a first nervous step towards lowering her defences when she had told him about that Swiss bank account. She had to be honest with herself at least. She loved the rat. She desperately wanted to be convinced that their marriage
was
real and that it did have a future.
As her steps sounded on the stairs some twenty minutes later, Alessio strolled out of the drawing room. A shaft of sunlight glittered across his luxuriant black hair; burnished his eyes and threw into prominence his hard, classic cheekbones and beautiful mouth. Intense sexual awareness literally froze Daisy in her tracks. She couldn't take her eyes off him. She could barely breathe. Her heart pounded in her eardrums, the blades of unquenched desire scissoring cruelly through her taut length, filling her with embarrassing heat as every pulse raced.
Alessio threw back his head, hooded knowing eyes resting on her with a flicker of lazy amusement. ‘I knew you would sleep late. You had an extremely restless night.'
Her face flamed.
‘We're going out for lunch,' he drawled.
A Ferrari was parked on the gravel outside. There was something oddly, disturbingly familiar about the vehicle but Daisy wasn't capable of making a connection at that moment. She climbed in on shaking legs, scarcely conscious of what she was doing. A hunger that had no limit had possessed her, shattering her with its greedy intensity. She lifted a trembling hand to push back her hair, overtly conscious of the aching fullness of her breasts and the painful tautness of her nipples.
Soon after, in the thundering silence, Alessio brought the powerful car to a slow halt in a lay-by screened from the road by a thick line of trees. There was something even more awesomely familiar about that view beyond the windscreen. But still its significance escaped Daisy; it merely confused her more. With a seemingly casual hand Alessio reached out and released her seat belt. ‘You deserve to be in agony,' he murmured softly. ‘You're a stubborn little witch. You could try trusting me...'
‘Trusting you?' Daisy was way beyond reasoning.
‘If I can forgive you for Tara, you can forgive me for being too bloody proud to follow you over to London.'
Her breath caught in her throat, her eyes widening. In a handful of words Alessio had plunged right to the heart of the divisions between them, found them equal and dismissed them, almost...almost as if he had already worked out that her distrust stemmed from the tremendous pain she had endured when they had separated.
Alessio leant over her, smouldering eyes holding her entrapped. ‘And this...this
now
—this is where we begin again. You, me, nothing else.'
Like a programmed doll, Daisy raised a jerky hand and slowly ran a helplessly caressing fingertip along the sensual curve of his firm mouth. ‘I loved you so much,' she whispered, remembered distress fracturing her soft voice.
‘That makes
such
a difference,
piccola mia.'
A vibrant smile slashing his dark features, Alessio parted his lips to capture that marauding finger and lave it with his tongue.
Daisy moaned low in her throat, a fierce ache stirring between her thighs and turning her boneless. Her eyelids lowered on passion-glazed eyes, her back arcing as she slid languorously lower in the seat. Her submissive response dragged a stifled groan from Alessio. He eased a hand beneath the hem of her dress, exploring the smooth skin of her inner thigh. Her legs slid softly apart. The mere stroke of a finger against the burning heat and moisture beneath her silky panties reduced her to whimpering, quivering subjection.,
‘This was supposed to be your punishment, not mine,' Alessio confessed thickly.
Daisy's gaze ran down the poised length of his powerful body to the throbbing hardness outlined by the tight fit of his jeans and she melted simultaneously. ‘Go home?' she framed in a shaky, choky suggestion.
Alessio thrust a hungry hand into the fall of her hair and stabbed her lips apart in a raw, forceful kiss of sexual frustration. But then he pulled back from her and reinstated her seat belt, cursing under his breath when it proved recalcitrant. In complete bemusement, Daisy struggled to focus on him as he started up the Ferrari again.
‘We're lunching with my parents,' Alessio proffered in taut explanation.
‘Oh...' Daisy said simply, too much in the grip of other impressions and responses to react. Finally she was making that bewildering connection. ‘This is the same car you used to take me out in and we used to stop here before you dropped me back at the Morgans'.
‘Dio,
Daisy... have you only just worked that out?'
The
same
car, she though dazedly. He had kept the Ferrari all these years. Alessio wasn't sentimental. Yet he had also brought her back to the villa, to the same bedroom, the same bed... His own daughter had called him madly romantic and impetuous. Oh, dear heaven, Daisy reflected, seriously shaken by that novel idea. How blind could a woman be? Was it possible that Alessio was as obsessively set on recapturing what they had lost as she herself was?
‘My parents are flying over to London in a couple of days, ostensibly to view houses...but really to lie in wait for their one and only grandchild from France. It would be a very nice gesture if you were to agree to them flying her back here,' Alessio murmured.
‘No problem,' Daisy mumbled dizzily.
And astonishingly there wasn't. Daisy drifted into the imposing Roman mansion which had provided the backdrop for the most miserable, tension-filled weeks of her life and met not the Borgias in twentieth-century guise but two older people clearly under strain but as anxious to mend fences as she was.
‘We didn't welcome you into the family as we should have done the first time you were married,' Vittorio admitted with rueful emphasis, his eyes meeting Daisy's levelly. ‘We were still looking for someone to blame. And unfortunately watching the two of you together then was like watching two cars with blindfolded drivers racing towards a pile-up. Alessio seemed to suffer a personality change overnight. You weren't any happier. I engineered the divorce in the honest belief that I was doing what had to be done.'
Registering his sincerity, Daisy swallowed hard and nodded.
‘But you still didn't tell me the truth about that settlement,' Alessio reminded his father grimly.
Vittorio Leopardi grimaced and sighed. ‘At the time it seemed best to leave it buried.'
Alessio's mother cleared her throat and murmured with unhidden eagerness, ‘I expect you'll want to have more children as soon as possible...'
Daisy tensed, her eyes flying to Alessio.
‘I shouldn't think so,' he said, directing a quelling glance at his parent.
Daisy lowered her head. Stupid to feel rejected, she told herself. Even more stupid to feel suspicious of his motives. How could she blame him for feeling like that? Alessio could have only the most disastrous memories of her last pregnancy. But, whatever lay behind his reasoning, it still hurt, she acknowledged.
 
Alessio reached for her hand as they walked back out into the sunlight. ‘You see... the monsters were in your imagination. My parents are well aware of how badly they behaved in the past.'
His understanding touched something deep inside Daisy. She met his golden gaze and her heart skipped a beat, her pulses pounding. Concentration became impossible. They didn't talk much on the drive back. Having narrowly missed a ticket for speeding, Alessio shot the Ferrari through the gates of the villa with a groan of relief.
‘Do you remember what we did to recover from your very first meeting with my family?' he murmured thickly.
Daisy went hot all over and blushed. It had taken too many glasses of wine to carry her through that long-ago meal with the coldly disapproving Leopardis. Alessio had carried her up the stairs, laughingly asserting that he couldn't take her home until she had sobered up, and... she had tried to take his jeans off with her teeth.
‘I'm still waiting for you to do that again.'
‘You didn't wait then,' Daisy muttered, alarmingly short of breath.
‘Practice makes perfect,' Alessio breathed in a husky, sensual growl.
They were crossing the hall in a direct line to the stairs when a maid appeared. ‘There is a Signor Barry Stevens on the phone,
signora,'
she recited breathlessly.
‘B-Barry?' Daisy stammered in surprise.
‘How the hell did
he
get this number?' Alessio launched down at her accusingly.
‘I don't know!'
His hard mouth twisted, his brilliant eyes suddenly icy cold. ‘Obviously you've been in contact with him since we arrived.'
Daisy swept up the phone in the library. ‘Who gave you this number?' she hissed down the line without any preliminaries.
‘It was waiting for me when I got back to the office yesterday. I understand that you wanted me to call!'
‘No,' Daisy groaned.
‘So you don't have any news for me?' he pressed thinly. ‘Then who left that flipping message telling me to contact you?'
‘I'm afraid it must have been someone's idea of a joke. Barry...please don't call here again,' Daisy sighed wearily.
Alessio was still standing in the hall, his dark, strong face impassive and set like granite.
Daisy snatched in a deep breath. ‘Alessio... either Bianca or Nina must be responsible for giving Barry this number because I have not been in touch with him—'
‘Why the hell would either of them want to do something like that?'
‘Both of them seem equally keen to cause trouble between us,' Daisy stated doggedly, her chin coming up in response to his blatant incredulity.
‘I'm not into crazy conspiracy theories, Daisy. If your toy boy is missing you, find someone else to blame. But don't insult my intelligence by trying to drag my sister or Nina into the mess you've left in your wake!'
The acrid sting of tears struck Daisy's strained eyes. ‘You said...you said that I could try trusting you...when are
you
going to try trusting
me
? she prompted painfully.
Alessio dealt her a look of bleak contempt and strode out of the house.
Daisy folded her arms in a jerky motion and then her patience snapped. What a moody, volatile swine Alessio could still be! No matter what he said, he was still as suspicious as hell of her every move.
 
Desperately keen to look as if she had barely noticed his absence, Daisy was floating on a Lilo in the swimming pool when Alessio put in a reappearance. Since it had taken so much effort to get onto the Lilo, she didn't twitch a muscle behind her sunglasses and maintained an attitude of sun-worshipping relaxation and cool.
‘If you've got into that water without learning how to swim, I'll kill you!' Alessio spelt out in a raw opening salvo.
Daisy looked smug. ‘I can swim... I can even lifesave.'
‘Since when?'
‘Since I found an instructor who didn't think dropping me in the deep end and telling me I would float would miraculously do the trick.'
‘Come out,' Alessio ordered.
‘Why should I?' Daisy retorted, sitting up suddenly and without due care and attention. The Lilo lurched and she made a frantic attempt to correct her balance but still ended up being tipped into the water with a gigantic splash.

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