Love's Revenge: The Italian's Revenge / A Passionate Marriage / The Brazilian's Blackmailed Bride

So she was completely lost to a blessed oblivion when a pair of arms firmly gathering her in brought her swimming back to consciousness.

‘No.’ Her response was instant rejection.

‘Be still,’ Vito’s deep voice flatly countered, and, drawing her into the warm curve of his body, he firmly clamped her there. ‘You may wish to pretend that I do not exist right now, but I do, and I am here—’

‘While your lover is several thousand miles away,’ she tagged on waspishly.

‘Marietta is your obsession, not mine,’ he replied. ‘But since you have decided to bring her into this bed with us, may I remind you that you are here to replace her? So stop fighting me, Catherine.’ Once again his arms tightened to subdue her wriggling struggles. ‘You may like to believe that you are the only miserable one in this bed, but you are not. And I need to hold you as much as you need to be held like this.’

He wasn’t talking about Marietta now, she realised. He was talking about something far more emotive. Impulsively she opened her mouth to say something about that—then changed her mind, for her emotions were in such a dreadful mess that remaining silent seemed wiser at this moment than saying anything that could well start another quarrel.

So she subsided, reluctantly, into the warmth of his embrace, felt his muscles relax when he recognised her surrender. And as she began taking on board other things, like his nakedness against her thin cotton pyjamas, she bitterly wished that the man wasn’t so physically alluring.

Wished to God that she wasn’t so useless as a woman. She wished her heart didn’t hurt so much and her brain was more able to make a clear-cut decision between what was right and what was wrong.

And she wished so very sincerely that the world would stop turning, so that she could get off it and never come back to it again!

‘Cry if you want to,’ his rusty voice encouraged.

‘No,’ she refused, but her body was already trembling with the effort it was costing her not to.

‘It was the right thing to do, Catherine. The only thing to do.’ Vito’s mouth pressed a kiss to the back of her head. ‘But that does not mean you must not mourn the decision.’

But it did—it did! And Vito was never going to understand what that decision was costing her because she was not going to tell him—or tell anyone for that matter.

‘I just want to go to sleep and forget all about it,’ she whispered thickly.

‘Then do so,’ he allowed. ‘But I will be here if you change your mind, cara. Right here beside you.’

Was this his way of making up for the time when he hadn’t been there for her? If it was then Catherine was not going to taunt him with it. Because she might be absorbed by her own torment right now, but she could feel the way his hands were tensely gripping her hands, that Vito was no less tormented.

CHAPTER SEVEN

HIS arms stayed wrapped around her throughout the long night. Each time Catherine swam up from the dark well of sleep towards reality she felt him there, and drew enough comfort from that to help sink her back into oblivion once again.

The next morning he woke her up very early and gently reminded her to take her second set of pills. Without a word she dragged herself out of the bed and disappeared into the bathroom. But it was only as she stood there in the middle of the bathroom floor, feeling a bit like a spare part that had no useful function, that the sudden realisation that something was different had her glancing down at her left hand—then going perfectly still when she saw her rings winking up at her.

The first one—an exquisite square-cut diamond set to stand on its own—she’d received a week after she’d told Vito she was pregnant with Santo. The second was the plain gold band given to her on her wedding day that matched the one Vito wore on his finger. And the third—a diamond-encrusted eternity ring—arrived the day after she’d announced the coming of their second baby.

When had he done this? she wondered frowningly, remembering that there hadn’t seemed to be a single moment during the night when she hadn’t been aware of him right there beside her. Yet he must have left her at some point and gone downstairs to his safe in the study, where she presumed he had placed her rings when she’d left them behind her, then come back upstairs to slide the rings on her finger—carefully, so as not to waken her.

But why had he done it? That was the much more disturbing question. And why last night, of all nights, when she couldn’t have felt less deserving of these rings if she’d tried?

What kind of message was he trying to convey to her? There had to be some significance in him replacing these rings on her finger last night when things could not have been more pitiable between them.

A statement of intent? ‘I am here for you, Catherine,’ he had told her. And the appearance of her rings seemed to be telling her that he wanted her to know he was seriously committing himself to this ailing marriage of theirs, when really what had happened yesterday could not have been a better reminder as to why he was better off without her!

Guilt riddled through her. The guilt of a woman who knew she wasn’t being entirely truthful with him.

But then, she asked herself, when had she ever felt that she could be? She had always only ever felt like a means to an end for Vito. First as a very compatible lover, then as the mother of his future child, and now as a necessary means of making his son happy. You couldn’t build trust and honesty on foundations as shaky as theirs were.

Rings or no rings, none of that had changed since yesterday. She still felt as alone now as she had done on the day she’d lost their baby three years ago.

‘Forgive me, Catherine,’ he had pleaded at that time. ‘If there was anything I could do to make the last twenty-four hours go away then I would do it. You have to believe me.’

But no one, not even Vito, was able to turn back time. It had already been too late for them by then. Just as it was also too late to change the consequences of the last twenty-four hours now.

And right now as she stood here, staring at these rings which seemed to be making such an important statement, she wished he hadn’t done it when it only complicated a situation that was complicated enough already. Because he didn’t know.

He didn’t know …

A point which made her manner awkward when she returned to the bedroom a few minutes later. ‘Thank you,’ she mumbled, making a gesture with the hand bearing the rings.

He smiled a brief, tight smile. ‘I missed them last night,’ he explained. ‘Then could not go to sleep without putting them back where they belonged.’

That word ‘belonged’ made her aching heart flinch. And for the life of her she couldn’t think of a single thing to say in reply. So a tension built between them, a different kind of tension that lacked the old hostility that usually helped to keep them going.

Vito eventually filled it. ‘So—what would you like to do today?’ he asked briskly. ‘I usually take Santo on a short horse-ride on his first day here, to brush up on his riding skills.’

‘Fine.’ It was her turn to flash a brief, brisk smile. ‘I’ll come too, if I may.’

But her light reply sent his eyes dark. ‘That was the idea, Catherine,’ he said soberly. ‘That we do things together as a family.’

‘I thought I just agreed to that,’ she countered blankly.

‘It was the way that you said it,’ Vito grimly replied. ‘As if you were afraid you may be an intrusion.’

This time Catherine’s smile was wry to say the least. ‘Let’s face it, Vito. I wouldn’t be here at all if Santino hadn’t backed you into a corner.’

His eyes began to flash. And, snap—just like that the antagonism was back. ‘Well, you are here,’ he grated. ‘And this is your home. We are your family and the sooner you come to terms with that, the sooner you will stop being an intrusion!’

With that, Catherine watched him slam himself into the bathroom, leaving her to wonder what the hell had motivated it.

Going back over the conversation, the only thing she could come up with that could have ignited his temper was her silence after he had explained about her rings.

Had he been expecting a whole lot more than a blank stare? A declaration of mutual intent, maybe? But why he should expect or even want that baffled her. He had never looked for those kind of declarations before when—marginally—they’d had something more substantial to work with than they had now.

And anyway, she concluded as she went to find something suitable to wear to go riding in, she felt more comfortable with antagonism than she did with the terrible lost and vulnerable feeling that she’d woken up with this morning. So let him stew, she decided. Let him bash his ego against the brick wall of her defences if that was what he wanted to do. Because there was no way that even Vittorio Giordani could really believe he had a right to expect more from her than he was willing to give out himself!

Yet something fundamental had altered inside him, Catherine had to admit as her first week in Naples drew to a close. For after that one show of his Italian temperament Vito had never uttered another harsh word to her, and seemed to be very careful not to give her the opportunity to flash hers at him.

He had allotted this week to spend with Santo, and work had been set to one side so he could play the loving family game their son had been promised. So they’d filled in their days by riding and swimming, and with trips out around Naples. And their nights had been spent in each other’s arms, without even the slightest question of sex rearing its emotive head between them.

And slowly—slowly—Catherine had begun to relax her guard a little, begun to cautiously enjoy herself. And without the sex to complicate matters, they had actually managed to achieve a kind of harmony that was almost as seductive as the sex used to be.

But it couldn’t last. Did she honestly believe that it could? Catherine asked herself as she lay, supposedly relaxing with a book at the poolside, left entirely to her own devices for the first time since she had arrived back here. Luisa had announced her intention to take Santo and a group of his friends off to the beach for the day, and Vito had informed her that he planned to spend the day in his study, putting in some work for his neglected company.

Nothing particularly life-changing in those events, you would think, she mused to herself. But, for reasons she refused to let herself delve into, the book she was reading wouldn’t hold her attention. After having pounded out a dozen or so laps of the pool, she had hoped she would just collapse on the sunbed in exhaustion, but she hadn’t.