Vengeful Seduction

‘And I’ll tell them exactly what I’m telling you now! That you’ve gone off your rocker!’

‘You don’t understand!’ she retaliated, and he moved towards her.

‘What don’t I understand?’ He stood in front of her, staring down.

For a second she didn’t have a clue what to say. From the start there had been a thread of suspicion underneath his anger at her decision and she realised that her words, spontaneously spoken, had tightened the thread. She couldn’t afford for that to happen. He was too clever by half for him to be allowed a glimpse of the truth behind the black farce.

‘I care about Jeremy,’ she said, not meeting his eyes, and he tilted her chin up in a rough gesture.

‘Like hell you do.’ His hand moved from her chin to coil into her hair so that she was forced into looking at him. ‘There’s only one person you care about. Would you like me to prove it to you?’ His mouth twisted into a smile but there was nothing gentle in it.

‘Lorenzo, don’t!’

‘Why? Are you frightened?’

‘No, of course I’m not frightened!’ She tried to laugh but it came out as a choked sound. ‘I am going to marry him,’ she said, placing her palms on his chest and feeling his masculine energy whip into her like an electric current. ‘You may not like the idea, but it’s a fact of life and there’s no point in trying to do anything about it.’

‘You were my lover,’ he said in a low, rough voice. ‘Were you playing games behind my back with him? Is that it?’

‘No!’

‘You hardly saw him when you were at university. You hardly went home and weekends were with me.’ His brain was ticking, thinking it through, applying the same ruthless intelligence to the enigma as he applied to any problem. ‘He could hardly have come up to see you during the week. He wouldn’t have been able to wangle the time off from his job.’

‘He wrote,’ she admitted. It was a small concession and it was true. Jeremy had written.

‘You arranged a wedding courtesy of written correspondence?’ Lorenzo sneered, and his grasp on her hair tightened. ‘Don’t make me laugh. You went out with the boy for one term when you were sixteen, yet you set a wedding-date by virtue of a few letters?’

‘This is pointless,’ she whispered, and anger flooded his face.

‘You,’ he said grimly, ‘have been mine since you were sixteen. You are twenty now and we have been lovers for over a year. Jeremy has never been a part of that picture. You have always belonged to me.’

The words invaded her mind and threw up images of Lorenzo, his strong arms wrapped around her, his mouth exploring her body. He had been her first and only lover.

‘I belong to myself,’ she muttered, trying to wriggle free.

‘Tell me that you’re in love with him,’ Lorenzo murmured savagely in her ear. ‘Let me hear you say it.’

He was so close to her that she could feel his heart beating, smell the rough sweetness of his skin. Ever since she had known that she would marry Jeremy, she had avoided Lorenzo Cicolla like the plague, because his proximity was the one thing she had feared most and, standing here, she knew that she had been right.

‘You can’t, can you?’ he taunted. ‘Then why? Has he threatened you? Answer me!’

‘Of course not,’ she heard herself say quickly, too quickly. ‘I’ve known him since we were children. We played together. We had the same set of friends.’

‘I played marbles with a girl called Francesca when I was ten but that didn’t automatically mean that we were destined for each other, for God’s sake! Anyway, you’re talking in the past tense. The past tense is history.’

‘History makes us!’

‘You forget, I know him well too. Well enough to know that he can be dangerous. He has always taken risks, stupid risks, and the only reason he’s got away with them is because his parents have had the money to bail him out every time.’

‘He holds down a job!’

‘That means nothing.’

‘Why are you his best man if you hate him so much?’ she asked bitterly. Why are you? Why did you have to be here?

‘Don’t you know? He offered it as a challenge, Isobel, and I never refuse a challenge.’

‘You’re as bad as he is.’

‘My intelligence outstrips his,’ he said in a hard, controlled voice. ‘Any risks I take are born from cool calculation. Jeremy saw me as a threat the minute I set foot in that school and when he discovered that I couldn’t be bullied into taking his orders, he did the next best thing. He decided to befriend me, and frankly I didn’t care one way or the other. But don’t you know that underneath the friendship there has always been an undercurrent of envy and resentment?’

‘I know,’ Isobel muttered. ‘But he did like you.’

‘He respected me.’ Lorenzo said this without a trace of vanity. ‘When he asked me to be his best man, we both knew the reason. The reason was you.’

She turned away, not wanting to hear any more. Everything he said was tearing her apart.

‘You were the prize draw,’ he mocked. ‘You have always been the prize draw. In this little, tight-knit community, you were the light that outshone the rest. You dazzled everyone. You were the greatest trophy.’

‘Where is this getting us, Lorenzo?’ she asked, doing her utmost to keep the misery out of her voice.

‘You’re catapulting yourself headlong into disaster,’ he grated, a dull red flush spreading over his cheeks. ‘There is still time to get out of its path.’

This, she knew, was the closest he would ever get to begging, and it made every bone in her body ache with the craving to do just what he asked.

Everything he had said about Jeremy was true. Jeremy had been obsessed with her. He had singled her out and it had never really occurred to him that his privileged background, which had bought him everything, couldn’t similarly buy him her. He had proposed to her when she was sixteen, still at school, while he had been at university, four years her senior. She had laughed. Now the joke was on her.

‘I will marry Jeremy——’ she looked at her watch ‘—in less than thirty minutes’ time,’ she said in a whisper, ‘and that’s all there is to it.’

His lips tightened and his expression changed subtly from anger to contempt. She didn’t know which she hated more.

‘I never took you for a coward or a fool, Isobel Chandler, but I’m rapidly revising my opinion.’

‘People are more complex than you give them credit for,’ she said in a low voice.

‘What are you trying to say to me?’ His eyes glinted and the sun, streaming in behind him through the large bay window, gave him a brooding, dangerous air that frightened and excited her. He had always frightened and excited her, she realised. He had walked into that school and she had been open-mouthed. She and every other girl in the class. They had been a group hesitatingly crossing the dividing line between childhood and adulthood, realising with an uncertain thrill that boys were not quite as uninteresting as they had once assumed. Lorenzo Cicolla with his bronzed skin and his black hair, four years older but vastly more mature than the other boys of his own age, had captivated their imagination. They had giggled from the sidelines, observed him from the distance with the blushing innocence of youth.

The fact that he had not looked at her, at any of them, even with the mildest of curiosity, had only added to his appeal. In fact, it was only when she was sixteen, ironically through Jeremy, that they had struck up a tentative friendship and he had admitted, with amusement at her reaction, that he had always noticed her. He might have been young, but he had already cultivated the dark, intense composure that had hardened as he got older.

‘I’m not trying to say anything.’

‘No? Why do I get the impression that you’re talking in riddles?’

‘I have no idea.’ She shrugged but her hands were trembling, and she quickly stuck them behind her back and clasped them together.

‘What did those letters say?’

She gave him a blank look, and then realised what he was talking about. She might have guessed that he would not have left for too long her unwary admission that Jeremy had written to her. There had only been one letter, but she wasn’t going to tell him that.