Second-Time Bride(27)

Alessio threw back his head, hooded knowing eyes resting on her with a flicker of lazy amusement. ‘I knew you would sleep late. You had an extremely restless night.’

Her face flamed.

‘We’re going out for lunch,’ he drawled.

A Ferrari was parked on the gravel outside. There was something oddly, disturbingly familiar about the vehicle but Daisy wasn’t capable of making a connection at that moment. She climbed in on shaking legs, scarcely conscious of what she was doing. A hunger that had no limit had possessed her, shattering her with its greedy intensity. She lifted a trembling hand to push back her hair, overtly conscious of the aching fullness of her breasts and the painful tautness of her nipples.

Soon after, in the thundering silence, Alessio brought the powerful car to a slow halt in a lay-by screened from the road by a thick line of trees. There was something even more awesomely familiar about that view beyond the windscreen. But still its significance escaped Daisy; it merely confused her more. With a seemingly casual hand Alessio reached out and released her seat belt. ‘You deserve to be in agony,’ he murmured softly. ‘You’re a stubborn little witch. You could try trusting me...’

‘Trusting you?’ Daisy was way beyond reasoning.

‘If I can forgive you for Tara, you can forgive me for being too bloody proud to follow you over to London.’

Her breath caught in her throat, her eyes widening. In a handful of words Alessio had plunged right to the heart of the divisions between them, found them equal and dismissed them, almost...almost as if he had already worked out that her distrust stemmed from the tremendous pain she had endured when they had separated.

Alessio leant over her, smouldering eyes holding her entrapped. ‘And this...this now—this is where we begin again. You, me, nothing else.’

Like a programmed doll, Daisy raised a jerky hand and slowly ran a helplessly caressing fingertip along the sensual curve of his firm mouth. ‘I loved you so much,’ she whispered, remembered distress fracturing her soft voice.

‘That makes such a difference, piccola mia.’ A vibrant smile slashing his dark features, Alessio parted his lips to capture that marauding finger and lave it with his tongue.

Daisy moaned low in her throat, a fierce ache stirring between her thighs and turning her boneless. Her eyelids lowered on passion-glazed eyes, her back arcing as she slid languorously lower in the seat. Her submissive response dragged a stifled groan from Alessio. He eased a hand beneath the hem of her dress, exploring the smooth skin of her inner thigh. Her legs slid softly apart. The mere stroke of a finger against the burning heat and moisture beneath her silky panties reduced her to whimpering, quivering subjection.,

‘This was supposed to be your punishment, not mine,’ Alessio confessed thickly.

Daisy’s gaze ran down the poised length of his powerful body to the throbbing hardness outlined by the tight fit of his jeans and she melted simultaneously. ‘Go home?’ she framed in a shaky, choky suggestion.

Alessio thrust a hungry hand into the fall of her hair and stabbed her lips apart in a raw, forceful kiss of sexual frustration. But then he pulled back from her and reinstated her seat belt, cursing under his breath when it proved recalcitrant. In complete bemusement, Daisy struggled to focus on him as he started up the Ferrari again.

‘We’re lunching with my parents,’ Alessio proffered in taut explanation.

‘Oh...’ Daisy said simply, too much in the grip of other impressions and responses to react. Finally she was making that bewildering connection. ‘This is the same car you used to take me out in and we used to stop here before you dropped me back at the Morgans’.

‘Dio, Daisy... have you only just worked that out?’

The same car, she though dazedly. He had kept the Ferrari all these years. Alessio wasn’t sentimental. Yet he had also brought her back to the villa, to the same bedroom, the same bed... His own daughter had called him madly romantic and impetuous. Oh, dear heaven, Daisy reflected, seriously shaken by that novel idea. How blind could a woman be? Was it possible that Alessio was as obsessively set on recapturing what they had lost as she herself was?

‘My parents are flying over to London in a couple of days, ostensibly to view houses...but really to lie in wait for their one and only grandchild from France. It would be a very nice gesture if you were to agree to them flying her back here,’ Alessio murmured.

‘No problem,’ Daisy mumbled dizzily.

And astonishingly there wasn’t. Daisy drifted into the imposing Roman mansion which had provided the backdrop for the most miserable, tension-filled weeks of her life and met not the Borgias in twentieth-century guise but two older people clearly under strain but as anxious to mend fences as she was.

‘We didn’t welcome you into the family as we should have done the first time you were married,’ Vittorio admitted with rueful emphasis, his eyes meeting Daisy’s levelly. ‘We were still looking for someone to blame. And unfortunately watching the two of you together then was like watching two cars with blindfolded drivers racing towards a pile-up. Alessio seemed to suffer a personality change overnight. You weren’t any happier. I engineered the divorce in the honest belief that I was doing what had to be done.’

Registering his sincerity, Daisy swallowed hard and nodded.

‘But you still didn’t tell me the truth about that settlement,’ Alessio reminded his father grimly.

Vittorio Leopardi grimaced and sighed. ‘At the time it seemed best to leave it buried.’

Alessio’s mother cleared her throat and murmured with unhidden eagerness, ‘I expect you’ll want to have more children as soon as possible...’

Daisy tensed, her eyes flying to Alessio.

‘I shouldn’t think so,’ he said, directing a quelling glance at his parent.

Daisy lowered her head. Stupid to feel rejected, she told herself. Even more stupid to feel suspicious of his motives. How could she blame him for feeling like that? Alessio could have only the most disastrous memories of her last pregnancy. But, whatever lay behind his reasoning, it still hurt, she acknowledged.





Alessio reached for her hand as they walked back out into the sunlight. ‘You see... the monsters were in your imagination. My parents are well aware of how badly they behaved in the past.’

His understanding touched something deep inside Daisy. She met his golden gaze and her heart skipped a beat, her pulses pounding. Concentration became impossible. They didn’t talk much on the drive back. Having narrowly missed a ticket for speeding, Alessio shot the Ferrari through the gates of the villa with a groan of relief.

‘Do you remember what we did to recover from your very first meeting with my family?’ he murmured thickly.

Daisy went hot all over and blushed. It had taken too many glasses of wine to carry her through that long-ago meal with the coldly disapproving Leopardis. Alessio had carried her up the stairs, laughingly asserting that he couldn’t take her home until she had sobered up, and... she had tried to take his jeans off with her teeth.

‘I’m still waiting for you to do that again.’

‘You didn’t wait then,’ Daisy muttered, alarmingly short of breath.

‘Practice makes perfect,’ Alessio breathed in a husky, sensual growl.

They were crossing the hall in a direct line to the stairs when a maid appeared. ‘There is a Signor Barry Stevens on the phone, signora,’ she recited breathlessly.

‘B-Barry?’ Daisy stammered in surprise.

‘How the hell did he get this number?’ Alessio launched down at her accusingly.

‘I don’t know!’

His hard mouth twisted, his brilliant eyes suddenly icy cold. ‘Obviously you’ve been in contact with him since we arrived.’

Daisy swept up the phone in the library. ‘Who gave you this number?’ she hissed down the line without any preliminaries.

‘It was waiting for me when I got back to the office yesterday. I understand that you wanted me to call!’

‘No,’ Daisy groaned.

‘So you don’t have any news for me?’ he pressed thinly. ‘Then who left that flipping message telling me to contact you?’

‘I’m afraid it must have been someone’s idea of a joke. Barry...please don’t call here again,’ Daisy sighed wearily.

Alessio was still standing in the hall, his dark, strong face impassive and set like granite.

Daisy snatched in a deep breath. ‘Alessio... either Bianca or Nina must be responsible for giving Barry this number because I have not been in touch with him—’

‘Why the hell would either of them want to do something like that?’

‘Both of them seem equally keen to cause trouble between us,’ Daisy stated doggedly, her chin coming up in response to his blatant incredulity.

‘I’m not into crazy conspiracy theories, Daisy. If your toy boy is missing you, find someone else to blame. But don’t insult my intelligence by trying to drag my sister or Nina into the mess you’ve left in your wake!’

The acrid sting of tears struck Daisy’s strained eyes. ‘You said...you said that I could try trusting you...when are you going to try trusting me? she prompted painfully.

Alessio dealt her a look of bleak contempt and strode out of the house.