told me everything.’ She leaned back weakly against the door. ‘Why, Tim? Why? Vito never did anything to you…’
His head flew up. ‘Oh, no? What about you?’ he demanded bitterly. ‘He wrecked your life. You had to drop out of uni. You’re not allowed in your own home. You live in a lousy bedsit, work in a lousy, demeaning job because of him!’
Her brother’s bitterness pierced her flesh like so many knives.
‘And that foul-mouthed little creep Pietro sneers about you like his uncle did something to be proud of!’
‘You don’t know what happened between Vito and me,’ she said haltingly.
‘You were nineteen and he was twenty-eight,’ Tim flared. ‘That tells me all I need to know.’
‘Our relationship just didn’t work out, Tim.’
‘He dumped you when you were pregnant and married someone else,’ Tim snapped back rawly.
She was drenched in pain by the blunt reminder of the child she had eventually lost. Grey-faced, she whispered tightly, ‘It wasn’t like that, Tim. He didn’t know I was pregnant. In fact, at the time we broke up, neither did I, and I never told him. There wasn’t much point once he was married.’
Her brother stared at her incredulously. ‘Don’t lie about it! I’m not a kid any more.’
‘But that’s how it happened.’
His complexion had a sickly hue now. ‘I don’t believe you. He let you down. He left you in the lurch. He used you! He must have known about the baby! He must have…’
‘Does Pietro?’
‘Well, no, but—’
‘Vito didn’t know.’ Her nails had bitten sharp crescents into her palms. Too late now to wish she had told him the whole story. But how could she have told him so that he would have understood? Some things you didn’t want to talk about. Some things you couldn’t explain to a teenage boy, who was determined to see his much maligned sister in the guise of an innocent victim, seduced and abandoned. In one sense, it had been that brutal, but in another sense she had chosen her own fate. And Tim’s response to her questions had confirmed her every suspicion. What had driven Tim over the edge was her situation, not his own.
‘Try not to worry too much,’ she murmured. ‘It may…it may just come all right.’
‘I’m not a baby, Ash,’ he muttered jerkily. ‘I fouled up. In the pub, it was all just spinning round and round in my head. What they’d done to you. What they’d done to me. I just couldn’t take any more. I just…I just saw red, you know?’
Yes, she knew exactly. In temperament, she and Tim were very alike. They had their father’s quick, seething temper and it was a curse. A curse and a weakness she abhorred.
Arnold was waiting downstairs for her. ‘I’ll drive you home.’
‘No, really…there’s no need.’
He draped her jacket round her slumped shoulders. ‘Come on. I need some fresh air.’
She had to give him directions. Apart from one enquiry as to how she was getting on with the Open University degree she was studying for, there was no further conversation. Both of them were buried in their own thoughts. But Ashley felt that she had the advantage.
After all, she knew what she had to do. She had to see Vito. He had at least to give her a hearing. And if she had to crawl, well, she would do it. If that was what it would take, so be it. Ashley and her pride were an inseparable duo but, where Tim’s freedom and her mother’s peace of mind were concerned, no sacrifice would be too great. It would be her penance for what Tim had had to suffer in her name.
As she slid tiredly into bed, the paralysis of shock was seeping away. The full horror of the night’s revelations was sinking in. Oh, dear heaven, why had this had to happen? How many times did she have to pay for one mistake, a mistake that, given her background, should have been easily avoidable? The mistake had been falling blindly, hopelessly in love with the wrong person.
Her mother had made the same mistake after all. Sylvia Forrester didn’t have a strong personality, however. Quiet and gentle, her mother would always follow where others led. After thirty-odd years of her husband’s bullying, she was an apologetic, self-effacing woman, far too weak to cross a man who had made a proud god of masculine domination. She had already had one nervous breakdown.
At eighteen, Ashley had been supremely confident of her ability to control her own emotions. She had had her entire future mapped out like a battle plan before her. University, a top-flight degree followed by a meteoric rise to prominence in the business world. Instead she had plummeted like a stone in the first year of her course. Why?
For a crazy five-month span she had lost sight of her goals. She had forgotten the lessons ground into her by her own upbringing. And, to make it even worse, she had honestly believed that she knew what she was doing. It was wonderful the excuses you could make to yourself when you wanted something you knew you shouldn’t have. And that put her feelings for Vito then into a nutshell.
Something forbidden, something dangerous, something out of control. Once she had prided herself on her self-discipline. There had been no place for a man in her battle-plan. Men took, men demanded, men expected, men complicated things. Maybe when she was at least thirty, she had thought with the na;auive certainty of youth, maybe when she was comfortably established in her career, she would let a man into one compartment of her busy, fulfilling existence. ‘He’ would be enthusiastically supportive of her ambition, content to accept that only that one tiny little compartment was his…
Fate had had the last laugh on her. Fate had thrown up Vito, a male as diametrically opposed to her ideal as he could possibly be. Once Vito had believed that he had her where he wanted her, so besotted she couldn’t think straight, he had tried to change her into a totally different person. Piece by piece he had eroded her confidence, criticising this, censuring that. Thank God she had woken up.
One day she might have looked in the mirror and seen her mother staring back at her. An unhappy woman, hooked on a man who was poison for her but too drained of strength and self-worth to take the antidote. It would be news to her sister, but in Ashley’s opinion there could have been no worse fate than to end up respectably married to Vito di Cavalieri…
* * *
‘There is no point in waiting any longer.’ The receptionist flashed her an irritated look. The phase of meaninglessly polite smiles was long past. ‘I did warn you that Mr di Cavalieri wouldn’t be available. When he’s in London, he’s exceptionally busy. His appointment book is filled weeks in advance.’
He wasn’t available on the phone and he was no more available in the flesh. He had to see her. He simply had to. He knew why she was here and he had to understand. There was nobody more family-orientated than Vito. She had called in sick at the day nursery where she worked as an assistant. On the dot of opening time, she had entered the Cavalieri Bank. Two hours on, she was still on the ground floor of a twenty-storey building. Perhaps it was na;auive of her, but she was appalled by the growing suspicion that Vito wouldn’t even give her five minutes of his time.
Her surroundings reeked of expense and elegance. Cross a brain like a steel trap with the
