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‘Mina——’
‘So if you want to go on thinking that I bounced straight out of bed with you into bed with him, go ahead! I’ll phone and tell Steve…he would be absolutely delighted to know you think that! But how dare you try to drag me down to the level of a slot on some pathetic male sexual score card?’
A dark flush of blood had highlighted his hard cheekbones. ‘That was not what I was doing,’ he told her rawly.
‘That’s exactly what you were doing! All that sophistication on the surface, and underneath what are you?’ Mina splintered tempestuously. ‘You’re so primitive you haven’t even made it on to the bottom rung of the evolutionary ladder!’
‘Whatever turns you on, cara,’ Cesare murmured, eyes a sliver of flaring gold below his black lashes.
Mina sucked in oxygen with an audible hiss, outraged by the comeback. ‘You’re not even listening to me, are you?’
‘I’m listening to you telling me what you know I want to believe,’ Cesare returned with a sardonic laugh.
That was the last straw. If she tried to defend herself she was immediately suspected of some devious motivation. The anger went out of her, snuffed like a candle. ‘Well, that’s it, then, isn’t it?’ she whispered bitterly. ‘I’m wasting my breath. Do you have to sleep here or do I get a reward for winning your lousy bet for you?’
‘That was a joke——’
‘That was an insult.’
The silence thrummed with violent undertones.
‘That was an insult,’ Cesare finally conceded, startling her with the admission.
‘You hate me.’ Pain fractured her voice, making her seal her lips and swallow hard.
‘Sometimes.’ Not troubling to deny the fact, Cesare sprang fluidly off the bed. His vibrant features unusually still, he studied her with dark-as-night eyes and his beautifully shaped mouth hardened. ‘But four years ago you could have had it all, cara. That’s the real joke. You were so busy plotting and planning you couldn’t see what was right under your nose. You sold me down the river for a pittance when you could have had so much more.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ And don’t much care, Mina completed inwardly, torn apart by the ever deepening gulf between them. It was a wedding night she would never forget, a humiliation she would never forget, and it seemed to her now that no matter what she did, no matter what she said Cesare would never listen. His prejudices were too entrenched after four years of brooding on what he saw as her betrayal.
‘I was in love with you.’
Her lashes fluttered up, revealing dazed violet eyes. ‘No…you weren’t,’ she said jerkily.
‘It hit me like a bolt of lightening on the flight to Hong Kong. My moment of truth,’ he drawled with derision.
Mina had turned white, shock reverberating through her. ‘No,’ she protested again. ‘You weren’t in love with me.’
‘Madly in love. I was thinking wedding-bells, honeymoons, christenings,’ Cesare reeled off with a scornful smile that chilled her.
Mina was paralysed by what he was telling her. It was like being told she had won a fortune and then discovering that she had lost the ticket required to prove her claim. It also ripped asunder her view of the past. For so long she had believed that Cesare had simply used her for a few hours of light entertainment and then regretted it but the picture he drew now devastated her, filled her with an embittered sense of loss and a raging resentment against the injustice which had parted them.
‘But not for long,’ she whispered unsteadily.
‘No, not for long,’ Cesare agreed. ‘But the subject of your wheeling and dealing on the stock-market is currently closed.’
‘It can’t be closed. It can never be closed!’ she told him in disbelief. ‘If you had once given me the opportunity to speak to you without Susie around before the wedding, I would have demanded that you produce the evidence that you say you have!’
Cesare dealt her a look of savage derision. ‘Meet your partner in crime…’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I destroyed the evidence.’
‘You did what?’ Mina gasped incredulously.
‘Think about it,’ Cesare advised. ‘You’re the mother of my child. You’re my wife now. To retain documents which could be used against you in criminal proceedings would be utter madness. Suppose that by some accident that evidence fell into the wrong hands? It was a risk I could no longer take. As long as you are my wife, I will protect you.’
She stared at him in shattered silence. Cesare had immense respect for the forces of law and order. That he had actually disposed of the evidence of an apparent fraud shook her rigid. It was not an act which he would have undertaken lightly. Indeed she was convinced it would have gone very much against his natural inclinations. ‘Meet your partner in crime’, he had said grimly, bitter at the role which he felt had been forced on him. He would protect her because she was Susie’s mother.
