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Her feathery lashes lifted. ‘I’m sorry…I’m just nervous.’
She didn’t want him. She didn’t want him. Valente looked into the misty depths of her grey eyes and willed her to prove otherwise, but neither encouragement nor even recognition energised her blank defensive expression. She didn’t want him. He didn’t want to accept that possibility. He lifted one hand and buried it in the tumble of her silvery blonde hair, cupping her small head with the span of his hand, holding her steady as he brought his sensual mouth back down on hers with all the demanding hunger he had until that moment controlled.
Taking fright at that forcefulness, and feeling trapped, Caroline reacted instinctively, tearing free of him and throwing herself backwards across the bed to slither down onto the floor. She braced her hands on the mattress for an instant before she straightened, because she was dizzy with stress and fear. ‘I can’t…I just can’t do this with you!’
His darkly handsome features stamped with stunned disbelief, Valente thrust back the bedding and sprang upright. Hugging herself tight with defensive arms, Caroline watched him pull on his boxers. The raw tension in his handsome, dark profile and broad, bronzed shoulders was powerfully apparent to her assessing, anxious gaze. Once again she had upset and hurt him. She felt as if she was bleeding inside and she hated herself.
Valente swung round to settle shimmering golden eyes on her like metal grappling hooks. ‘What the hell is going on here? You wanted me to marry you-’
‘I know… I know. I’m sorry-’
‘Sorry doesn’t cut it in this scenario,’ Valente incised. ‘I want an explanation.’
Her troubled eyes strayed down over his lean, powerful physique and veered away when she realised that the silk boxers could not conceal the bold bulge of his arousal. Guilt assailed her in a choking tide. ‘I told you I was no good at sex…’
‘What just happened in that bed was about more than you not being good at sex,’ Valente flung back at her in condemnation. ‘You turned into a marble statue in my arms, and then you fought free of my arms as if you were being assaulted!’
‘I thought it might be different with you… I’m so sorry.’ Caroline was fighting the buckets of overwrought tears penned up behind her eyes, determined not to stoop to that very feminine plea for sympathy. ‘I couldn’t bear it.’
That last phrase was all Valente absorbed: I couldn’t bear it. ‘It’ being his touch and proximity. Dark blood settled over his stunning cheekbones and a shudder rippled through his big body, and coiling his masculine hands into powerful fists.
‘Then why did you marry me?’ he demanded rawly.
Feeling all the more naked and foolish, standing 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 a
