turned the colour of putty. ‘What’s wrong? Are you ill?’
‘Bathroom …’ she muttered urgently from behind the hand she had clamped betrayingly to her mouth.
Moments later Caroline fell awkwardly to her knees on the tiles that floored the pale designer bathroom and was horribly sick—sicker than she had ever been in her life. She was appalled by the exhibition she was making of herself, and in between the retches gasped horrorstricken apologies.
‘Drunkenness is a big turn-off for me,’ Valente declared icily from the doorway. ‘Shout if you need assistance. Otherwise I’ll wait in the drawing room.’
‘Don’t you have any compassion?’ Big fat tears rolled down Caroline’s face as she choked and spluttered in the misery of disgrace.
‘No, and you would do well to remember the fact,’ he fielded without remorse, and the door snapped shut.
She had to hang onto the vanity unit to stay upright while she washed and freshened up as best she could. Although she had been sick, she still felt extremely unsteady on her feet. She took off her shoes and carried them.
Having resolutely banished the image of her suffering from his mind, Valente had returned to work on his laptop. He was in a very bad mood. The son of a father who had been an alcoholic, and abstemious in his own habits, he was disgusted by the state she was in. How dared she show up in that condition? How could she believe that such behaviour was acceptable to him? Did she think that he would want her at any cost, in any state, even drunk? For a male as fastidious as he was with women, it was an offence of no mean order.
She came into the room quietly, but he could still see how much of an effort it was for her just to put one foot in front of the other. His lean, breathtakingly handsome face hard as granite, he surveyed her with derision.
With half of her make-up washed off she was wan, and her smile was long gone. Barefoot, she no longer looked anything like a woman in her mid-twenties. She was so tiny, so delicate in build, with a ridiculously small waist and the fine bones of a bird. He shut off that dangerous train of sympathy-grabbing appreciation and flattened his expressive mouth into a stern line. This was the woman he would have married—the woman who probably would have been the mother of his first child by now.
‘I’m sorry. I was foolish … I don’t drink very often and I just drank far too much before I came out,’ Caroline confided in a sudden desperate rush. ‘I thought it would stop me being so nervous. I thought it would make me stronger—’
‘You’re not a teenager any more. You ought to know better,’ Valente retorted drily. ‘Drunks are never as entertaining as they imagine they are. You can’t even walk in a straight line. It’s not at all attractive.’
At that candid reminder, and still painfully aware of his merciless scrutiny, Caroline folded down on to the sofa beside her. She felt stiff and achy, and her head felt far too heavy for her neck. But more than anything she resented his attitude. After all, over the past forty-eight hours he had single-handedly put her through hell.
She lifted her chin, misty grey eyes bright with condemnation. ‘That’s a shame, when it’s your fault I got drunk in the first place.’
‘How could it be my fault?’ Valente growled, standing over her to stare down at her with judgemental dark eyes.
Caroline forgot her dizziness and leapt up again, clutching at the sofa-arm to steady her swaying legs. It was very much a case of mind over matter. ‘You did this to me by threatening harm to everyone I care about and landing the responsibility for what happens to them on to my shoulders!’
‘And such puny shoulders they are. Who would want to depend on you? I did once, and where did it get me?’ Valente murmured lethally. ‘You can’t blame me for your weakness.’
Caroline was bone-white at having that particular flaw flung back in her face. ‘When did you turn into such a total bastard? You don’t care about anything or anybody as long as you get what you want.’
‘The chances of my getting what I want at this moment look exceedingly remote,’ Valente derided, averting his attention from the voluptuous appeal of her generous mouth and the lush swell of her round breasts. He cursed his powerful libido, and a body which had no conscience and no concept of self-protection, for he was already fiercely aroused. He crossed to the other side of the room to take up a position safely out of temptation’s way. ‘As far as I’m concerned, your state of intoxication makes you untouchable. Other men might be less choosy, but I’m not one of them.’
‘Nothing I’ve done equals what you’ve done,’ Caroline accused, holding herself rigid by the sofa in an effort to reclaim some dignity. It took even greater endeavour to think and vocalise, for her head was light and she felt as if the room was spinning round her again. Scarily, it was beginning to dawn on her that the full effects of the alcohol she had imbibed might not yet have hit her. ‘You hate me. Why won’t you let me explain what happened five years ago?’
‘It’s irrelevant after this length of time.’
‘But I never got the chance to speak to you again because you’d returned to Italy. You even changed your mobile phone number. I wrote to you, though. I poured my heart out on paper. You never replied to my letters,’ she reminded him painfully, thinking of the long weeks she had waited, praying for a reply, and the terrible silence that had underlined the fact that he was gone for ever.
‘I chucked them in the bin unread. There was no point reading them. Some errors of judgement cannot be explained away or forgiven,’ Valente pronounced with disdain, utilising a little white lie to conserve his privacy and to avoid having to deliberate over one very minor inexplicable aspect of his own behaviour.
‘You really do hate me, don’t you?’ she pressed, huge pale silvery eyes focussed on him with disturbing intensity.
‘I wouldn’t waste that much emotion on you, piccola mia. What was done was done five years ago. Now, I think it’s time for me to call my driver so that he can take you safely home,’ Valente delivered.
‘How can I go home when I don’t know what’s going to happen next?’ Caroline exclaimed.
Valente dealt her an incredulous appraisal. ‘If this was a trial view of what you might be like as a wife, you’ve bombed with spectacular effect.’
‘I wouldn’t want to marry you anyway!’ Caroline yelled at him, full volume. ‘I promised myself that I would never get married again because being tied to the wrong person is my definition of hell! Not to mention the fact that you’re sarcastic, cold and callous, manipulative, hypocritical, unscrupulous and sexually deviant!’
‘Sexually deviant?’ Valente launched back at her, only troubling to argue that one phrase of her outraged description of his character.
‘How else would a normal man describe summoning his former fiancée to a hotel like she’s a prostitute?’
‘Define “normal”,’ Valente invited. ‘I’d say I’m still in that class, but possibly a little more adventurous and imaginative than most. If you hadn’t wrecked it, it could have been a very sexy scenario.’
‘For someone with no morals!’ Caroline raged, finally into her stride and ignoring the horribly light-headed swirl she was in, and the fact that her view of Valente appeared to be coming and going and fogging over while her own voice had
