there in front of him with her arms crossed in a protective screen over her breasts, Caroline said, ‘I want to get dressed and then we can … talk.’
‘Maledizione … you will talk now,’ Valente delivered with emphatic force. ‘I have listened to enough nonsense.’
Caroline took him by surprise and backed into the bathroom to her right, slamming shut the door and ramming home the bolt to lock it with trembling urgency. That achieved, she stripped off what remained of the fancy lingerie with frantic hands. She hated those fanciful undergarments which could only remind her of her inadequacies in the seduction field.
‘I’m out of patience. If you don’t come out, I’ll kick the door down,’ Valente warned her dangerously from the other side of the door.
Caroline grabbed the flamboyant turquoise silk robe that hung on the back of the door and put it on. It had been made for someone a good deal taller and carried the exotic scent of another woman’s perfume. Of course he had had other lovers—probably hundreds of them, she thought wildly, and every one of them would have given him more pleasure than she ever could. As the door was struck with savage force she looked desperately round the tiled room for some means of escape, but she was stuck. The bolt broke away from the wood on the second blow and the door swung wide.
Valente focused on her standing there, as straight and defiant as an early Christian martyr while wrapped in his former mistress’s robe. As a picture it was all wrong. Housekeeping, he acknowledged, had fallen down in not removing that garment. It was not a moment when he wanted to be reminded of Agnese’s voluptuous sensuality in the bedroom. Agnese, who hadn’t been able to get enough of him between the sheets. Agnese, who had begged him to keep her on even after his marriage and who had dared to suggest that no wife could replace her. And just this once, Agnese, whose beauty and vanity were legendary, had been proved right.
‘How dare you do that to me.?’ Caroline protested, trembling like a leaf after that demonstration of male aggression. She felt helpless, threatened, for she did not know how to defuse his anger.
‘How dare you pose there, shaking like I’m about to physically hurt you?’ Valente raked back at her, closing a firm hand round her wrist and urging her back into the bedroom. ‘I’m entitled to an explanation from you. Feeling like you obviously do about me, why did you insist on marrying me?’
It was the question she had most dreaded, for she could not defend herself on that score. ‘I couldn’t have cut it as a mistress,’ she pointed out heavily, half under her breath. ‘You wouldn’t have helped my parents or Hales after an experience like this. So it had to be marriage. That’s your fault. You offered me so much to be with you that you made it impossible for me to refuse.’
Outraged condemnation had fired his beautiful eyes to a golden heat that threatened to burn her tender skin. ‘Yet right from the beginning you knew that the only thing I wanted from you was sex. So you deliberately set out to rip me off.’
Caroline tore her guilty gaze from him and studied the carpet. ‘There wasn’t a choice. But I did hope it would work out between us.’
‘Even though you recoiled from me in disgust the first time we kissed again?’ he bit out rawly.
Caroline paled. ‘That’s not what I felt.’
‘How could you possibly have hoped it would work out? I was so hot for you I was blind to all the signals that something was wrong and you knew it. You kept your distance and played me right up to the doors of the church. You’re a liar and a fraud!’
Every word cut into her like a knife, reminding her of failings that she was already all too well aware of. ‘Yes, in that field I was … but I did try to tell you the truth about me at the beginning,’ she reminded him painfully, the intimate conversation tearing off entire layers off her protective skin. Now that he knew her secret, she felt horribly exposed. ‘I’m frigid. It’s my problem, nothing to do with you.’
‘Dannazione! How can it be nothing to do with me? You promised to give me a child. What hope have we now of achieving that ambition?’
Caroline was pale as milk. ‘None, I suppose.’
‘You cheated me, and I don’t allow anyone who does that to walk away unscathed. You may be my wife, but for how much longer?’ Valente slung that question at her with icy derision. ‘You left one salient fact out of your financial calculations. If this marriage isn’t consummated I can have it set aside and it will be as if we were never married. I’ll be free of you and you will no longer be entitled to a settlement of any kind.’
With that final contemptuous speech Valente snatched up the clothing he had discarded, strode into the adjoining bedroom and closed the door firmly in his wake.
What shook Caroline at that instant was that she had to stop herself from running after him. What shook her even more was the intense emotional pain of his rejection. He hated her. He couldn’t wait to get rid of her. It was as if the roof had fallen in above her and the floor beneath her feet had vanished, so that she was still falling, falling, falling, in a never-ending downward spiral. The only thing I wanted from you was sex. And it was the one thing she couldn’t give him.
The veil between her plotting and her secret desires had been torn apart by their confrontation. Had she wed him for her family’s sake? To save the workers at Hales from the dole queue? Or because she had dreamt of turning the clock back five years and magically reclaiming the love she had once lost? Wasn’t it true that what she had really wanted more than anything else was a second chance with Valente? But history was history, and couldn’t be eradicated any more than she could get over her sexual dysfunction just because she wanted to. In despair, she sobbed into the pillow.
Even though it was late, Valente wanted to phone his legal team and put them to work on ridding him of his brand-new wife. Having switched off his emotions, he was in business mode, and keen to take action on what he viewed as an act of fraud committed against him. But the prospect of telling anyone alive that his bride had just refused him froze him into rare inactivity. Dressed, he strode downstairs, startling the staff still engaged on cleaning the dining room. He poured a drink in the drawing room and strode out on to the loggia.
I thought it might be different with you. Her words fluttered back to haunt his disarranged thoughts. It had been that bad with Matthew, as well? Valente’s rage began to abate at that awareness. She didn’t like sex, and whose fault was that? It was a fault that could only be laid at Matthew Bailey’s door. Pacing the loggia, while Umberto lit candles on the stone tables and sent his employer concerned glances, Valente pieced back together everything he knew about his bride.
Five years back she had been shy, innocent and inhibited, but she had never shown the slightest hint of fear when he touched her. There had been nothing abnormal about her reactions. Could he have been mistaken about the response she had recently given him when he kissed her? Was she repelled by him personally? Or simply repelled by sex? And what did the fear and her flight into the bathroom to shelter behind a locked door suggest? A fear that he might not take no for an answer? The lean strong bones of his face clenched hard on that suspicion. The instant he acknowledged her terror, everything else fell into place. She had had to get drunk to come to him at the hotel that night. She had been miserable throughout their wedding day out of fear of what the night would bring.
Without a doubt she had known she had a serious problem, and she hadn’t shared it because she had been afraid he would walk away, when he was the only guy available to solve all her family problems. While he understood, he couldn’t forgive her for her deception. Nothing could excuse her trickery in demanding a
