Weddings: The Nights: Virgin on Her Wedding Night / Claiming His Wedding Night / One Wild Wedding Night

The older man answered his phone quickly. ‘Caroline? Thank goodness I’ve finally got hold of you,’ he exclaimed, before telling her that her father had suffered what Charles referred to as ‘a funny turn’ the evening before, and had been taken into hospital. Her mother had accompanied her husband, and had already phoned Charles that morning to ask if he thought she ought to call the police because she couldn’t get hold of her daughter.

‘I’ll go straight to the hospital,’ Caroline stated, in a daze of disbelief and horror at what had been happening while she lay asleep.

‘Hospital?’ As she stood up, Valente closed a hand round her arm to still her. ‘What’s going on?’

Her eyes brimming with guilty tears of anxiety, Caroline explained in harried tones while dialling the number of the hospital which her uncle had given her. She wanted to ensure that her mother would receive a message of reassurance as soon as possible.

‘I’ll take you there right now,’ Valente declared, contacting his staff in turn to issue instructions. ‘Why would your mother have wanted to call the police, though? Do you never stay out overnight?’

‘Of course not. I didn’t worry about last night because I assumed they were safe at Charles’s house. I should have known better,’ she lamented, her conscience eating her alive because she had not been available to offer help and support when she was needed. ‘Now they’ll know I didn’t come home, and they’ll be terribly shocked and upset by that. Who am I supposed to say I was with? If I admit it was you, it’ll be like Armageddon.’

‘You’re an adult, not a child, piccola mia. An explanation shouldn’t be necessary. You were married for several years.’ Brilliant dark eyes assailed her and her tummy somersaulted in response. ‘I can hardly believe that you are still allowing your parents to rule you to this extent.’

‘It’s not like that!’ Caroline proclaimed angrily. ‘I rarely go out at night, and they know I don’t have a boyfriend, so of course they would worry when they discovered that I wasn’t at home in the middle of the night. Unlike you, I lead a very quiet life. Why on earth did you switch off my phone?’

‘The doctor I had summoned to attend to you was waiting to speak to me, and you were in no fit state to deal with a phone call.’

His argument was unanswerable.

Caroline hung her head. ‘I feel so cheap, walking out of a hotel dressed in last night’s clothes. Everybody will know I’ve had a one-night stand.’

‘I should be so lucky,’ Valente quipped, soft and low. ‘The minute we got together it was guaranteed to go wrong. There could not be two more different people on this planet than you and I.’

In the grand foyer on the ground floor, Caroline tried to behave like the invisible woman for the benefit of any interested parties who might choose to regard her as a slut for being seen wearing a cocktail dress at breakfast time. Valente, however, closed a hand over hers and urged her into the hotel boutique.

‘I called ahead,’ he breathed as a saleswoman approached them with a smile.

‘Mr Lorenzatto? I believe we have exactly what you’re looking for.’

With a smile, she extended a dressy sapphire-blue raincoat for Caroline to try on.

Caroline was duly inserted into the coat and the sash pulled tight at her waist. ‘Perfect,’ Valente pronounced, flexing a gold credit card before urging her back into the foyer again.

‘I’ll have to pay you for this,’ Caroline muttered uncomfortably, but she was relieved to have the means of concealing a dress that would have looked highly suspicious to her mother.

‘You don’t ever pay,’ Valente riposted. ‘That’s the main advantage of being the mistress of a very rich man.’

‘I didn’t know I was still in the running,’ Caroline said breathlessly, suddenly aware that his staff and security team were all waiting beside the fleet of cars parked at the front of the hotel, and eying her with intense curiosity. She blushed to the roots of her hair.

Valente noted that every man in their radius was unashamedly staring at the little figure by his side. Even when she made no effort to attract masculine attention she oozed femininity, cuteness and sex appeal from every pore. He clenched his even white teeth hard. Just minutes earlier he had been thinking that enough was enough, and he didn’t want to be involved in the complexities of any form of relationship with Caroline. But the thought of leaving her free, if poor, to be scooped up by some other man had zero attraction for him.

He turned smouldering dark golden eyes on her again. ‘But you want to stay in the running, don’t you?’

Her lashes swept up on her bright eyes and she nodded very slowly in agreement, although she couldn’t quite believe what she was doing.

‘So,’ Valente breathed huskily, ‘you believe that you can do better than last night?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Caroline told him blithely, refusing to give way to her usual sense of failure and low expectation.

His own expectations on a stimulating sexual high, Valente smiled wolfishly down at her for the first time since that unforgotten solitary vigil at the church.

CHAPTER FIVE

‘YOU don’t need to come in with me,’ Caroline told Valente as the limousine drew up outside the hospital.

Valente simply ignored the statement.

Almost running to keep up with his long stride, Caroline made a second attempt to deter him before they reached Reception. ‘You must have loads of more important things to do,’ she said breathlessly.

Valente discovered on which ward her father was from a receptionist, who gave him the kind of starstruck treatment a famous celebrity might have received for an unannounced visit. At a trot, to match his groundbreaking progress through the busy corridors, Caroline clutched at his jacket-sleeve to bring him to a halt. ‘You can’t let Mum and Dad see you. You can’t let them know I was with you last night.’

He gave her anxious face a long, steady scrutiny. ‘Are you a child or an adult?’

‘This is not about me or you—it’s about my father’s health. He mustn’t have any shocks or upsets right now. He’s on a waiting list for heart surgery,’ she explained in an urgent undertone.

‘I would still like to speak to your parents …’

‘You’re the guy who owns their business and is about to chuck them out of their home,’ she reminded him bluntly. ‘Why would they want to see you when they’re already worried sick about Dad’s health?’

Finally, Valente agreed to wait round the corner from the side ward where she was directed to find her father. From there, however, once the curtains round the bed were partially drawn back, he had a perfect view of Joe Hales. The older man’s face was an unhealthy colour, his rasping breathing audible even from where Valente stood. Joe was wired up to a monitor; his wife was seated by his side. Valente was shocked by how much Caroline’s parents had aged since he had last seen them. Isabel had shrunk in stature even more.

But as Caroline’s mother broke into urgent speech, Valente soon appreciated that she might have become thinner, and her back more bent with her advancing years, but her abrasive controlling personality had not mellowed at all.

‘Where were you last night?’ Isabel demanded accusingly. ‘We’ve been worried sick about you.’

‘Now, now …’ Joe Hales interposed, striving to give his daughter a reassuring smile from blue-tinged lips as Caroline squeezed his hand affectionately. ‘We don’t want her sitting home every night at her age.’

‘I had a meeting with Valente,’ Caroline responded, striving to stick to the truth as far as she could. ‘I knew you were staying with Uncle Charles and I switched my phone off. I’m so sorry you weren’t able to get in touch with me.’

‘You went behind our backs to see that Italian?’ her mother hissed, in a tone of furious disbelief.

‘But you knew that I was seeing Valente yesterday morning,’ Caroline pointed out in a quiet, defensive tone, aimed at reminding Isabel that raised voices could be clearly heard through the rest of the ward. ‘How are you feeling, Dad?’

‘Tired, that’s all. Your mother’s been a tower of strength,’ Joe declared, endeavouring to calm his wife down with a change of topic.

‘We can’t just let this go. It’s a matter of decency,’ Isabel pronounced truculently. ‘I refuse to have any conversation with you at all, Caro, until you tell us why you didn’t come home last night.’

A pulsing silence fell while Caroline attempted to come up with a convincing story. Could she pretend that she had been at Winterwood all along and simply hadn’t heard the phone ringing? Shouldn’t she be adult enough to stand her ground and insist on her right to some privacy? It was not the time or the place. The look in her mother’s cold blue eyes cut like glass through Caroline’s frantic guilty thoughts, panicking her, making her feel like the worst daughter in the world, while once again making her painfully aware that she would never know happiness until she had garnered the strength to stand her ground against such domination. The ensuing awful silence, which she did not know how to fill, cut at her nerves like a slashing whip.

Valente brushed back the curtains and took up position by her side, greeting her parents with a cool and calm that knocked Caroline sideways before saying, ‘Last night I wouldn’t let Caroline go back to an empty house. Winterwood is remote, with your nearest neighbour living a considerable distance away. In your absence, I thought it made more sense for Caroline to spend the night at the hotel.’

Her eyes fiery, Isabel Hales opened her mouth to speak and closed it again only when her husband leapt thankfully on that explanation, which fitted in beautifully with his old-fashioned outlook. He found it perfectly acceptable that Valente should be protective towards his daughter. ‘That was the best idea in the circumstances. No harm done,’ Joe pronounced with relief, his eyes sliding shut, as if he was struggling to stay awake, and then slowly opening again.

‘Of course Caroline protested,’ Valente quipped.

‘Y-yes,’ Caroline stammered, overpowered by his intervention and his ready wits. ‘Dad, you look like you need to get some sleep.’

‘Let me offer you a lift home.’ Valente addressed Isabel Hales. ‘You must be exhausted if you’ve been here all night.’