Virgin on Her Wedding Night (13 page)

‘I wanted you. All along, my only goal was to gain access to you.’

‘But you started this three years ago, when Matthew was still alive and I was his wife!’

Valente veiled his black-lashed unrepentant gaze. He had pinned his colours to the mast and he wasn’t the man to retreat. ‘Whether you were married or otherwise made no difference to me.’

Caroline rested shaken eyes on him and then turned away, wandering over to the windows to stare sightlessly out at the superbly evocative Venetian skyline. He was so aggressive, so destructive, so unashamed of the methods he had employed. In a word? Ruthless. Yet once he had shielded her from that side of his character, persuading her that he was a much more humane and understanding character.
This
was the man she loved?

‘No cost was too high to pay, was it?’ Caroline accused in a sudden surge of disgust as she totted up the consequences of his behaviour. ‘What do you think the slow decline of Hales and the loss of those contracts did to my father’s health? It broke his heart. It was his father’s firm, and he was horribly ashamed that he couldn’t keep it in business. You didn’t care that you were hurting my family because you still thought I had let you down.’

His jawline took on an even more stubborn angle. He stood there with the macho air of a male urging her to throw whatever she liked at him and see how well he would withstand the barrage. ‘You
did
let me down.’

‘How did I let you down? By falling ill? By being in hospital the night before our wedding? How was that my fault?’ Caroline launched at him shakily. ‘That was fate. The second thoughts and the doubts and fears that tormented me the next morning while you were at the church
were
my fault. I admit that, but I still wasn’t well enough to get out of that bed and do anything for myself.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Valente was forced to growl, the reference to hospital having cut through his reserve and ignited his frustration. ‘I told you that I didn’t read your letters.’

‘Any…of them?’ she prompted unsteadily, before turning away, her hand crammed to her wobbly mouth. Further speech seemed pointless. She had poured out her heart in those letters and all to no avail—for he had not even taken the time to read what she had written.

Pulling herself back together again, Caroline focused on Valente with stark denunciation in her eyes. ‘You’re not the man I thought you were even five years ago. You’re more damaged than I could ever have realised. Although you set out to destroy my family, you forgave the family of the man who raped your mother… I don’t understand. Why couldn’t you forgive my parents or me?’

Rigid with self-discipline, Valente bit back the hot words brimming on his lips and watched her turn on her heel and walk to the door. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m going to lie down…I’m scared I’ve got another migraine coming on,’ she admitted grudgingly, rubbing
her fingers across the tightness beginning to band round her temples. ‘And then I’m flying back to England as soon as it can be arranged—because you scare me.’

‘How do I scare you?’ Valente demanded angrily, outraged by that indictment.

‘You tell me you’ve been plotting against me and my family for years and you don’t understand why I’m scared of you?’ Her voice broke at the height of that incredulous question. ‘Do you think that’s
normal
behaviour?’

Caroline lay on their bed in a stupor of distress and shock. How could he have been so cruel as to deliberately destroy her family’s livelihood? All right, her parents were not his parents, but they were at a vulnerable age. Had he no conscience at all? Of course, how many people had shown Valente love? No doubt his mother had loved him, but she had died when he was only a teenager, and only after gifting him the bitter knowledge that he was a child born of rape. Valente had only ever known the rougher, more painful faces of lust and love. He still believed Caroline had let him down deliberately five years earlier. How could any man be so stubborn in holding on to his convictions? Yet now, ironically, she understood him so much better, for his image was now clear in her mind. He had scorned her love in the present because he had no faith in her past claims of love. The love of women like Agnese Brunetti had been for his money, and his lean, powerful body, not for the essential male behind the fine feathers.

And no feathers came more fine, Caroline conceded, studying the opulent grandeur of her surroundings with pained eyes. The child of rape had triumphed in worldly
terms, but not before suffering many vicissitudes and rejections. It hurt to appreciate that she only figured as one more rejection in his chequered life, yet she had loved him so much. And whatever he had felt for her had been strong enough, enduring enough, to bring him back to her five years on. In fact, over a long period of time he had put in an enormous amount of effort to ensure that when he did re-enter her life he was in an unbeatable position of power and influence. It would be a bit of a come-down for him if he was ever to realise that all he had really had to do was make himself available, and one or way or another she would have come back to him of her own free will.

Valente leafed impatiently through the contents of his safe in the library. He was in a blind rage, and the feeling of being almost out of control unnerved him. At last he extracted a letter, no longer white and fresh, in a fat, battered envelope. Why had he kept it when he refused to lower himself to the level of reading it? He had dumped all those that came afterwards unread. Well, now he would find out what Caroline had been talking about…doubtless some stupid tangle of lying excuses designed to make him think better of her.

He sat down with a glass of the Villa Barbieri’s finest wine and ripped open the envelope with something less than his usual cool. There were eight pages of Caroline’s handwriting to be assimilated. He flattened the first sheet to read, and the breathless over-the-top opening made him acknowledge for the first time how young Caroline had still been in those days, ‘My dearest, darling, beloved Valente…’ it began.

Something twisted inside him, and he began to read with more appetite than he had had when he first lifted the letter. She claimed to have been rushed into hospital with a burst appendix the night before their wedding. Valente went cold, for he was recalling the small seam of scar tissue on her lower abdomen which he had noticed and intended to ask her about—until the pull of her proximity had driven the seemingly minor matter from his mind. Adrenalin pumping through him, he read on at speed. She had been on the operating table fighting for her life while he had been waiting for her at the church. She had asked her father to ensure that Valente was informed and brought to see her, but Joe Hales had passed on that responsibility to Matthew instead. Matthew had, in turn, refused to leave the hospital until Caroline was out of danger.

Reeling in shock from what he had learned, Valente plunged upright and strode off to find Caroline straight away. He did not know what he was going to say to her. He only knew that it was of the utmost importance that he talked to her, as he had never talked to her in the entirety of their relationship, and that was a challenge he was not even sure he could meet.

He glanced into her workshop before he went upstairs. The glass cats still sparkled in the light coming through the window. He was touched that she had kept them all these years.

A floorboard creaked in the master bedroom and Caroline’s lashes swept up: Valente was stationed at the foot of the bed, rather like the Grim Reaper in a designer suit. ‘Have you got a migraine?’ he asked.

‘No, I think it was just the tension getting to me.’

‘I never read that letter you sent me five years ago,’ Valente admitted harshly.

‘There were at least six of them.’

‘I dumped them without reading them—but I kept the first one you sent.’

Her smooth brow indented. ‘Why would you keep it and not read it?’

‘I was like an addict resisting temptation,’ Valente confided, squaring his chin. ‘Even as recently as two months ago I was proud of my ability to resist opening that letter. I didn’t want to read your excuses for fear that I would mellow towards you, and my pride wouldn’t allow me to run that risk.’

Conscious that Valente had to be in a very strange mood to be talking about such promptings, Caroline slowly levered herself up from her prone position. ‘You resisted my letter as if it was a dangerous drug?’ she rephrased, wondering if she could possibly have heard him right—because she had never dreamt that he might suffer from such quixotic thoughts and reactions.

‘I didn’t read it until tonight. It was a…a devastating experience,’ he confessed in a jerky undertone, his strain pronounced. ‘You were sick. I wasn’t there when you needed me.’

‘Nobody told you I needed you or that I was ill.’

‘But I should have considered the possibility.’

‘I tried to phone you that evening—’

Valente rested tormented dark eyes full of regret on her. ‘I chucked my mobile phone off the bridge into the river beside the church because I didn’t want to be tempted into phoning you. I wanted to be strong.’

‘Well, you were certainly that,’ Caroline conceded. ‘Why didn’t it occur to you that something had to be badly wrong?’

Dark colour had flushed his stunning cheekbones. ‘I believed that you loved me, but I also knew that you had doubts and insecurities. Perhaps I expected too much from you.’

Sadness filled her. ‘It was a big challenge to face leaving my family and everything I knew to live in a foreign country, but I would have done it to be with you. In hospital that morning I wondered if my illness was fate intervening, and I waited too long to ask Dad to give you a message. But if you’d come back, tried to see me or speak to me even…’

Valente grimaced. ‘I’m obstinate. I’m very proud. At many times when my life has been difficult those were the strengths that carried me through,’ he explained. ‘But I should have had more faith in you. That is what finished us—my lack of faith. I was convinced you had wronged me, that your family had persuaded you to just leave me at the church. I blamed you for it all.’

Caroline wanted to cry. She wondered how she could have expected him to have faith in such circumstances, when so many people in his life had hurt him. ‘I believed you had received my message before you went to the church. Matthew lied about that. He threw the truth at me after we were married, when he was annoyed with me, and admitted that he had made no attempt to get in touch with you.’

‘As you learned too late, Matthew had a mean side,’ Valente quipped.

‘But you didn’t?’

‘No, I always had a ruthless streak,’ Valente contradicted. ‘I wouldn’t have survived or prospered in my world without it. The only person I ever allowed to see me without that armour was you.’

The tears overflowed from Caroline’s eyes and rolled down her cheeks. Valente came down on the side of the bed and reached for her. She slapped away his hand in rejection. ‘No, don’t you dare touch me! How could you not read even one of my letters? How could you be dumb enough to see that as a test of how tough you could be?’ she wailed at him furiously.

Valente gazed back at her with dark, strained eyes. ‘It was that macho streak you don’t like. You made me vulnerable and I didn’t like it. This time around I wanted everything to be different.’

‘And it certainly was that,’ Caroline agreed, sliding off the far side of the bed and smoothing down her crumpled linen dress. ‘You blackmailed me into bed with you.’

‘And you blackmailed
me
into marriage,’ Valente traded with amusement. ‘Having worked out that I wanted you at any price, you then came up with the highest price you could think of. The biter was bitten.’

Caroline shifted uncomfortably. ‘That wasn’t how I saw it. I knew that once you found out I was frigid you’d ditch me and forget all your promises.’

Valente lifted a sardonic brow. ‘Isn’t it strange that I stuck by you instead of going for an annulment on the grounds of non-consummation?’ he prompted. ‘Why do you think that was?’

Caroline wore an uncertain look. ‘Because you would have found that an embarrassing way to end our marriage?’

‘My reputation is such that it would not have caused me embarrassment. I wanted more than your body, even if I wasn’t prepared to admit that to myself at the time.’

‘Well, you did a very good job of convincing me that all you wanted was sex,’ Caroline told him, unimpressed.

Valente stood up. Lean, darkly handsome face intent, dark eyes brilliant, he strolled towards her. ‘Don’t you get the slightest vibe when a man loves you? You know I spent years plotting to get you back. You know I married you even though that wasn’t part of my plan. You know I stayed with you even though it didn’t immediately work out in the bedroom. Can’t you see what all that has to add up to?’

‘Are you trying to say that you love me—even though you rejected
my
love?’ Caroline shot at him in disbelief.

‘I was doing that macho thing. But I’ve taken off the armour again. Tonight I finally appreciated that I love you more than anything in my life…even business,’ Valente confided. ‘And I know that’s not a romantic comparison, but business is very important to me.’

‘And I’m even more important?’ Caroline felt out of breath, as though she had just run up a hill too fast.

‘The very centre of my world,
cara mia
. Without you, my life would have no true meaning.’

Valente closed his arms round her slight figure with caution, for she was tense and wide-eyed, everything about her stance suggesting indecision. ‘I held on to my memories of you long after I should have done, and unfortunately I held on to my bitterness as well. I love you very, very much,’ he breathed softly. ‘I was never able to forget you or replace you.’

Sheer excitement made her heart feel as if it was
jumping for joy inside her chest. ‘And you already know how I feel about you.’

‘I didn’t believe you when you said you loved me. I didn’t believe you for a second,’ Valente hastened to explain. ‘I thought you were just using words to try and soften me up.’