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‘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 shoulde
rs 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 developed a horrible echo in her ears. ‘I don’t know how to do “very sexy”, or “deviant”, which is why I had to get drunk to come here. But I did it with the right intentions-to help other people.’
Valente was intrigued rather than repulsed by that feisty attack. He was also surprised to discover that the thought of teaching her how to do sexy and deviant in the bedroom had a tremendous appeal that had nothing at all to do with revenge, punishment or good business.
‘To help other people?’ he traded sardonically, unimpressed. ‘Why do you always play the victim? You came here tonight because you were set on saving your own little carcass from the threat of homelessness and poverty, because you would very much enjoy the status and luxury of being my wife, and because, much as you want to deny it with your martyr act, you want a good excuse to get into my bed.’
‘That’s absolutely a lie!’ Caroline snapped shrilly, taking a jerky, uncertain step forward-before crumpling down in a heap on to the carpet like a wind-up doll whose battery had suddenly gone flat.
For an instant Valente thought she was staging a bogus faint, like in the final shot of a melodrama, and he groaned out loud. But something about the stillness of her small shape drew him closer to examine her. He crouched down beside her inanimate body and tried to rouse her again. She had not tripped or struck her head, But when she failed to show any sign of life other than continuing to breathe, grudging concern coloured his cynicism. He rang Reception and asked for a doctor to be called. Offered first aid assistance, he gave a negative answer. If, as he suspected, alcohol was the cause of her collapse, the fewer people who knew about it the better. He picked her up, only to be troubled by how little her slight body weighed, and carried her into the bedroom. He studied her stillness, wondering if he should have called an ambulance instead, or even if he should just be bundling her into his limo to head to the local A &E himself.
The smudged mascara couldn’t hide the purple shadows below her eyes that accentuated her pallor, or the reality that, with the exception of breast and hip, she was exceedingly thin. It was barely five minutes before a doctor arrived at the door; by chance, the older man had been checking in at Reception when Valente had called down and, having overheard the conversation, had offered his services.
Dr Seaborne took one frowning look at his diminutive patient and asked what age she was. Valente was outraged at having to rifle through Caroline’s bag to provide proof of her age on her driving licence before the man was satisfied that he was not some predator with a preference for underage girls. In the midst of that interrogation her mobile phone began ringing. Valente switched it off.
Deeply unimpressed by his inebriated patient, the doctor checked Caroline over as best as he could, and said that he saw no point seeking further medical help simply because she had passed out.
Although severely ruffled by the treatment he had received for the sin of harbouring a very youthful-looking drunk in his hotel suite, Valente knew he could not possibly have her delivered home unconscious without being forced to make the sort of explanation he had no intention of making to her parents. Furious with her for landing him into such an untenable situation, he stripped off her dress and slotted her into the bed-but not before wincing at her unexciting white underwear topped by the sin of tights rather than the tantalising appeal of stockings…
