‘How can you do that? I don’t want you fighting with my father … I don’t want people to find out about this—it’s private!’ Zara gasped, clutching at the well-cut jacket of his business suit with frantic hands.
Vitale closed his fingers round her fragile wrists and gently detached her grip. His face was forbidding in its austerity, his eyes hard as iron. ‘I’m not about to fight with your father. I am not planning to tell anyone else about this either—that is your choice to make. But I am going to make sure that he never ever dares to lay a finger on you again,’ he spelt out in a wrathful undertone. ‘I’ll see you later.’
Left alone, Zara trembled from the force of all the emotions she was fighting to contain. She was shaking with stress. Her father would lose his head again when Vitale approached him and made his accusation. The older man would know that once again his daughter had talked. A headache hammered painfully behind her taut brow and she sank down on the edge of the bed and breathed in slow and deep in an attempt to calm down. She was appalled by Vitale’s interference but even more shocked that she had surrendered and told him the truth. For so many years she had kept that family shame a deep, dark secret. Now all hell was about to break loose because she had just given a man who already hated her father another reason to despise and attack him.
For an instant though Zara was mentally swept back to the elegant drawing room where she had been rocked back on her heels by her father’s blow. Whether she liked it or not she had to admit that Vitale had made a valid point. Had she fallen she might have injured her baby or even miscarried. There was no excuse for her father’s violence; there never had been an excuse for his behaviour. But while she accepted that truth, intellectually dealing with something that had become so much a part of her family life was altogether something else. It had been her mother’s refusal to condemn her husband’s violence that had set the agenda of acceptance in Zara’s home. Although it hurt to admit it, her brother Tom’s insistence on ignoring the problem had also given strength to the idea that such violence had to be endured and concealed. Of course, her father had never struck Tom. Monty Blake had always aimed his violence at his womenfolk.
Feeling too sick to eat, Zara lay down on the bed and eventually fell asleep. Vitale’s return wakened her and she answered the door barefoot, her hair a tousled silvery cloud round her face as she blinked up at him drowsily. She was startled to see her father standing by Vitale’s side. In the shadow of Vitale’s greater height and raw energy, Monty Blake looked pale, wretched and diminished.
‘Your father has something he wants to say to you,’ Vitale proclaimed harshly.
‘I’m sorry I hurt you—it will never happen again,’ her father muttered with all the life of a battery-operated robot.
‘I’m not having a termination,’ she reiterated in a feverish whisper, wanting her father to know that that was not a price she was prepared to pay for family forgiveness.
In response to that revealing statement a murderous light flamed in Vitale’s gaze. ‘We’re getting married as soon as it can be arranged,’ he delivered.
Taken aback by the announcement, Zara shot him a confused glance. After all, he was already well aware of her thoughts on that subject. Dark eyes gleaming with purpose, Vitale stared back at her in blatant challenge. She parted her lips to argue and then decided to wait until her father was no longer present. She felt she owed Vitale that much after he had brought her father to her door to apologise to her. For the first time ever a man had tried to protect Zara rather than take advantage of her and she could only be impressed by that reality.
‘You must do as you see fit,’ Monty Blake responded flatly, turning back to Vitale to add, ‘Are you satisfied?’
‘For the moment, but watch your step around me and your daughter.’
Zara watched her father hurry back into the lift, keen to make his escape, and she slowly breathed in and out, the worst of her tension evaporating with his departure. ‘How on earth did you persuade him to come here?’
‘I didn’t persuade him, I threatened him,’ Vitale admitted without an ounce of regret. ‘He’s terrified of being forced to face the legal and social consequences of his behaviour. I’m surprised that you’ve never used that fear against him.’
Zara lowered her lashes, thinking of how she had been branded a troublemaking liar at the age of ten when she had tried to report her father’s violence to the authorities. Nobody had backed up her story, not even her mother, and by the end of it all nobody had believed her either.
‘He’s hit you before, hasn’t he?’ Vitale prompted darkly.
‘This was the first time since I grew up,’ Zara admitted grudgingly. ‘I don’t think he can help himself. I think he needs professional help or anger-management classes but he wouldn’t go to anything like that. He won’t admit he has a problem.’
‘Does he hit your mother?’
Zara glanced at his lean strong face and then looked away from the condemnation etched there to nod jerkily in reluctant confirmation. ‘She won’t do anything about it, won’t even talk about it. I’m glad you didn’t hit him though.’
‘I would have enjoyed smashing his teeth down his throat,’ Vitale admitted with a casual ease that shook her. ‘But it wouldn’t have helped anyone. Domestic violence is like an addiction for some men, but I believe that in your father’s case the threat of public exposure might have forced him to seek treatment.’
‘Did you confront him about your sister? About what happened the night that she drowned?’ Zara pressed in a strained undertone.
There was a bitter light in his eyes and his sardonic mouth twisted. ‘No, it wasn’t the right moment for me to demand those answers. I was more concerned about you.’
Vitale swung away, his last words still echoing inside his head; even he questioned his own restraint. How could he have been more concerned about her? Granted she carried his child, but he had spent half a lifetime dreaming of a confrontation with Monty Blake. Only to discover that, in the flesh, Monty Blake was scarcely a challenging target. Loredana’s former lover was a weak man, easily cowed by a more forceful personality and the threat of social humiliation.
Zara was frowning as well, marvelling that Vitale had had her father at such a disadvantage and yet had remained silent in spite of his fierce desire for revenge. ‘Did he realise who you were? Didn’t he recognise your name from your sister’s?’
‘Loredana and I had different surnames. Her name was Barigo.’ His lean strong face had taken on a shuttered aspect that warned her she had touched on a sensitive subject. Vitale, she realised belatedly, had family secrets as well.
‘Why on earth did you tell him that we were getting married?’
Vitale threw back his handsome dark head and settled his moody gaze on her. ‘I’m convinced that when you consider your options you’ll see that you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by becoming my wife—’
‘How?’ Zara interrupted baldly. ‘I’ve already told you how I feel about you.’
‘Take a risk on me.’
Her lips compressed. ‘I don’t take risks—’
‘But I do. That’s why I’m the CEO of a major investment bank,’ Vitale told her with savage assurance.
