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Caroline kept her head high. ‘I’m afraid it’s the only option I could accept-’
‘But what would I get out of it-apart from a sense of self-sacrifice?’ he fielded with unconcealed scorn, outraged by her cheek in even suggesting the idea, when she had stood him up at the altar five years earlier.
‘Then accept that I will never be your mistress, Valente. Evidently we’ve reached stalemate.’ Tilting her chin, Caroline opened the door and walked back out on to the landin
g with as much dignity as she could muster.
‘I would want a child.’
Lashes flipping up in bewilderment over her startled eyes, Caroline froze in her tracks. She was stunned by that entirely unexpected announcement.
‘An heir to follow in my phenomenally successful footsteps, piccola mia,’ Valente mused silkily. ‘How does that idea grab you?’
Caroline had turned pale, knowing that he had just presented her with yet another impossible challenge. ‘It doesn’t.’
Valente released a cruelly amused laugh. ‘I didn’t think it would, but that’s the final offer on the table, cara mia. If I take you as a wife there has to be something more in it for me than sex. In that department I have endless choice and no reason to choose marriage. But a child would be the perfect sweetener to the deal.’
‘Sadly, I’m not a whore or a brood mare.’
Valente cast her a lingering glance in the entrance hall. ‘All women are capable of playing the whore for the right man…or the right opportunity. I wanted you the first time I saw you and I still want you. You’ve upped the stakes and so must I. I’ll consider your idea if you spend the night with me at my hotel.’
Paralysed to the spot by that stunning proposition, Caroline gazed back at him with huge disbelieving eyes.
‘I always play hardball, and if you want a wedding ring for what you can get out of me as a legally wedded gold-digger, I expect to preview the merchandise,’ Valente delivered silkily. ‘I’m tied up in meetings until ten tonight. I’ll see you then.’
White as milk at that crack about merchandise, not to mention his belief that she had only mentioned marriage in the hope of reaping a greater financial profit from him, Caroline muttered, ‘I couldn’t possibly.’
‘Final word, last chance,’ he quipped, closing his arms round her slight body without warning and sealing her to his lean, powerful frame. ‘The game is over, angelina mia. Take your chance while you can, because it won’t come round again.’
Even a hint of what he probably saw as passion but she saw as potential coercion caused all the colour to bleed out of her complexion. It took every ounce of her self-command not to succumb to the urge to fight him off like an attacker. His strength, his very forcefulness, intimidated her. He dipped his mouth with comparative lightness down on to parted lips, and this time around she did not respond. In a sick daze of enforced tolerance, she was as still and unresponsive as a doll. Releasing his hold on her, he lifted his handsome dark head again, his shrewd, dark-as-night eyes arrowing over the frozen pallor of her face.
‘Is this little demonstration your final answer?’ Valente demanded, his musical, lilting Italian accent roughened and brusque in tone.
And she almost said yes. But something unrecognisable inside her surged up at the last moment with another answer entirely. It was an answer that took her aback almost as much as it surprised him. ‘No…no, it’s not!’
The fierce tension in Valente’s tall, powerful physique eased infinitesimally. He turned to smoothly greet the men descending the stairs. A few minutes later the cars outside were pulling away and heading back down the drive. But Caroline was welded to the spot long after they had vanished from view. Her sense of horror at the invitation he had made in the most demeaning of terms had momentarily deprived her of the ability to think straight. And then the phone rang.
It was her parents. They had been invited to dine with her father’s brother, Charles, who lived near the hospital, and would not be coming home until the following day. Her primary reaction was relief, and that shocked her, but she had no desire to discuss her meeting with Valente, or his visit to the house, as she knew she would have to lie about what had passed between them.
Only slowly did it dawn on her that she was now free to go to Valente’s hotel-but of course she wouldn’t do that. How could she? But Caroline’s subconscious mind had long nourished the disloyal suspicion that had she married Valente rather than Matt her marriage would have been consummated. It had been foolish to believe that she and Matt could change overnight from platonic friends into keen bed partners. Others more experienced with sex than she had been might have managed that jump, but she had failed miserably. From the first she had been shy, awkward and inhibited, discovering too late that the physical response Valente had awakened with ease had been sadly absent with the man she married. Everything that could go wrong had gone wrong between her and Matt, and once that pattern had been set it had been too late to change it.
What if it was different with Valente? Could she be like any other woman with him? It was an exciting question for a woman who was too afraid to even consider dating, and had long since assumed that she would be alone for the rest of her life. She shrugged off the memory of her moment of panic when Valente had last kissed her, because she badly wanted to believe that he could be the magic key to banish her inadequacy. What if she had a few drinks to loosen up first? Wouldn’t that give her more nerve and take care of her shyness and inhibitions? All she needed to do was get past that awful instant when panic threatened to sink in…
Bolstered by an inordinate amount of vodka, Caroline rebelled against the conservative wardrobe which Matt had insisted she should wear. He had made her feel old before her time, deeming make-up, nail varnish, shorter skirts and figure-flattering garments unsuitable for a married woman of her age. She reached into the back of the wardrobe for a dress she had bought when she was dating Valente, but which she had neither worn nor discarded. It was silvery blue, short, and it enhanced her slight curves. She left her hair down, the way she knew he liked it. Sheer tights and high-heeled sandals completed the look, but she was so startled when she saw her provocative reflection in the mirror she froze.
What sort of a woman dressed up for a one-night stand with a man who was planning to try her out as he might test-drive a new car? A really desperate woman, she acknowledged with a shame-faced shiver. It shook her that she might be even more desperate to discover whether she could be as sexy and desirable as any other woman than she was to become Valente’s wife in order to help the Hales employees and her parents. What did that say about her?
A long, long time ago, before other influences prevailed, Valente had briefly transformed her into the woman she very much wanted to be. A strong woman, sure of her own judgement, ready to take the risk of loving and marrying a man who inhabited a totally different world from her own.
Her parents had gone off the deep end when they’d discovered she was dating one of the drivers at Hales. They had despised Valente even before they’d met him, making wild accusations against him and forming even wilder assumptions, saying he would only use and abuse her, insisting that he was only interested in marrying her because she stood to inherit Hales. A good part of their melodramatic reaction had been based on Valente’s deprived background and lack of money, and Caroline had almost come to hate her parents for their arrogant prejudice.
Within weeks she had gone from being a devoted daughter to a deeply unhappy rebel, defying their demand that she give up Valente. But Matt had proved equally opposed to the relationship, and as he’d been a close friend his opinion had naturally influenced her.
‘You don’t have anything in common with him. He’s not one of us,’ Matt had argued loftily. ‘You’ve never gone without anything you wanted. How could you possibly cope with the life you would have with him? And don’t you owe your parents more than this? It’s not unreasonable for them to want their only child to stay in the UK and marry an Englishman, willing to treat them with the respect and consideration they deserve!’
Gnawing guilt had taken the edge off her every moment with Valente, and then her feelings had swung violently against her parents when Hales had stopped giving work to Valente. She’d had no doubt that he was being deliberately excluded. He’d had to find other loads and runs to continue making a living and coming to the UK. That had been when she’d agreed to be his wife, outraged by the unjust treatment he had suffered at her family’s hands.
Tearing herself free of those disturbing memories, and shrinking from an awareness of her immaturity and over-reliance on the opinions of others, Caroline studied her reflection in the mirror afresh and took another slug of vodka for good measure. She could be strong again. She could change everything around if she could just manage to share a bed with Valente for one night. Could that be so difficult? Once she had been madly in love with Valente. He was gorgeous. And surely he was so sexually experienced that he would soothe her nerves and help her to relax with him?
