LYNNE GRAHAM - Second-Time Bride

‘Or what a bastard he was...’ The assurance was out before Daisy could stop it.

Alessio’s long, lithe frame tensed—a reaction which gave her a quite extraordinary surge of satisfaction. Shimmering eyes lanced into her with stark incredulity. ‘How can you say that to me?’

‘Because being married to you was the worst experience of my life,’ Daisy informed him, throwing her head high.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘And, believe me, I didn’t require a financial bribe to persuade me into a quick exit! You were domineering, selfish and completely insensitive to what I was going through,’ Daisy condemned in a shaking voice that steadily crept up in volume in spite of her attempt to control it. ‘You left me at the mercy of your totally monstrous family and allowed them to treat me like dirt! You stopped talking to me but that did not stop you using my body whenever you felt like it!’

Alessio was transfixed. There was no other word for his reaction. The Daisy he had married would never have criticised him. In those days, Daisy had crept around being quiet and apologetic while silently, miserably adoring him, no matter what treatment he handed out. Alessio had accepted the adoration as his right. She hadn’t had the guts to stand up to him then, not when she had mistakenly blamed herself for the fact that he had had to marry her.

‘In fact you went into a three-month-long sulk the same day that you married me! And the minute your obnoxious family saw how you were behaving they all jumped on the same bandwagon. I didn’t just have one person making my life a living hell, I had a whole crowd!’ she spelt out fiercely. ‘And I don’t care how any of you felt; I was only seventeen and I was pregnant and I did not deserve that kind of punishment!’

Daisy fell silent then. She was shattered, genuinely shattered by the bitterness that had surged up in her and overflowed. Until now she had not appreciated how deep her bitterness ran. But then she had not had an opportunity to vent those feelings before. Within forty-eight hours of her miscarriage, Vittorio Leopardi had presented her with divorce papers. And, sick to the heart from all that she had already undergone and Alessio’s cruel indifference, she had signed without a word of argument.

‘So, when you took the money and ran, you thought it was your due,’ Alessio opined grittily.

She stole a dazed glance at him from beneath her feathery lashes. His darkly handsome features were fiercely taut. ‘I ran but I didn’t take any money,’ she muttered wearily, and then wondered why she was still bothering to defend herself. When it came to a choice between her word and his father’s, she had no doubt about whose Alessio would believe. And it wouldn’t be hers.

‘I despised you for what you did,’ Alessio admitted with driven emphasis. ‘And to listen now to you abusing my family makes me very angry.’

‘I doubt if I’ll lose any sleep over that.’ Yet Daisy’s heartbeat suffered a lurch when she met that anger brightening his hard gaze. Her chin came up, defying the sudden chill of her flesh. She had said her piece. She had waited thirteen years to say it and there wasn’t a single word of it which she could honestly have taken back. How could he still behave as if he had been the only one wronged?

When she had discovered that her miscarriage had not been quite what it had appeared, she hadn’t dreamt of bothering Alessio or his family with what would have been very bad news in their opinion. Indeed, still loving Alessio as she had, she had felt positively heroic protecting him from such an unwelcome announcement. He had wanted neither her nor their child, so she had taken care of the problem. She had kept her mouth shut, let the divorce proceed without interruption and brought her baby into the world alone. Alessio owed her! He had been able to get on with his life again, unhampered by all the many adult responsibilities that had become hers at far too young an age.

The limousine had stopped. She hadn’t noticed. She gazed out at the elegant Georgian square and simply knew that she could not bear another single minute in Alessio’s company. There was too much pain and confusion biting at her.

‘I’m going to catch a cab back to the office and say you cancelled,’ Daisy told him abruptly. ‘Then you can come back on Monday if you like and see the house with someone else.’

‘I don’t think your boss would swallow that story.’ Alessio’s shrewd gaze lingered on her and his expressive mouth took on a curious quirk.

‘I don’t care!’ Daisy stared back at him defiantly.

‘So you still make stupid decisions on the spur of the moment.’

Colour ran up in a hot, betraying flush beneath her fine skin. She knew exactly what he was getting at. ‘Shut up!’ she hissed back.

‘And you still blush like a furnace around me...in spite of your advanced years,’ Alessio chided with lazy enjoyment at her embarrassment. ‘And, in spite of my advanced years, you still turn me on hard and fast. Now isn’t that fascinating?’

Daisy couldn’t believe he had said that. The tip of her tongue stole out in a swift flick to moisten her lower lip. Involuntarily she connected with eyes that now blazed passionate gold, his ebony lashes low on his lingering scrutiny. The heavy silence stretched like a rubber band pulled too taut for safety.

‘If this is your idea of a joke...’ she began unevenly.

Alessio surveyed her with slumbrous intensity and a slow, devastating smile curved his mouth. ‘Don’t be pious. You’re feeling the same thing I’m feeling right now.’

Her breath was trapped in her throat. Daisy could not tear her bemused eyes from the potent lure of his. And it was not an unfamiliar sensation that was creeping over her, she registered in dizzy disbelief; it was an old but never forgotten sensation of quite incredible excitement. The whole atmosphere had a wild, electric charge. Her heartbeat was thundering in her eardrums, her whole body stretched and tight with every nerve-ending ready to leap.

‘Curiosity and excitement,’ Alessio enumerated with purring softness.

It was fatal to be so easily read but Daisy couldn’t help herself. Slowly but surely she was sinking back to the level of maturity she had reached at the time of the party at which they had first met, and she remembered the sheer, terrifying whoosh of emotion and response which Alessio had evoked in her even at a distance of twenty feet. One look and she had been trembling, pitched on such a high of breathless, desperate yearning that she had felt slaughtered when he’d looked away again. ‘Stop it...’ she muttered shakily.

‘I can’t. I like to live dangerously now and again,’ Alessio revealed huskily.

‘I don’t...’ But her wretched body was not so scrupulous. She was devastated to feel her breasts, now full and heavy, surge against the lace barrier of her bra, the swollen nipples tightening into shameless, aching peaks.

‘How would you feel about an afternoon of immoral, erotic rediscovery?’ Alessio murmured thickly, his scorching golden eyes, as hot as flames, dancing over her heated skin. ‘I’ll take you to a hotel. For a few stolen hours, we leave the anger and the bitterness behind and relive the passion...’

Daisy was stunned, and on another level she was recalling the end of that long-ago party when Alessio had finally deigned to speak to her and make the smoothest pass she had ever encountered. She had been stunned then too by his sheer nerve. His brazen disregard of what she had naively seen as normal courting rituals had shocked her rigid. He had planted a drink in her hand and asked her to go to bed with him that night. She had slapped his face.

He had grinned. ‘Tomorrow night?’ he had asked with unconcealed amusement in his beautiful eyes, and she should have known then that it would take more than one slap to dent that ego.