Pregnancy of Revenge(38)

It was nothing,' she said quickly. 'I caught sight of the painting on the wall and it reminded me of the painting you bought and something Diego said today.'

Jake's face hardened, but his hands eased slightly on her waist. 'Diego has a big mouth. Whatever he said, forget it, and drop the subject.'

If the command had not been so curtly delivered Charlie might have done so, but his strange attitude made her all the more determined to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Before she could lose her nerve she said, 'Diego thought you and I might have met earlier, because she was my father's lover and also a friend of yours. He actually thought Anna might have introduced us.' Drawing in a shaky breath, she asked the question she had wanted to avoid. 'Was she an ex-lover of yours?'

' Dio , no.' Jake was angry, ridiculously angry, and he had no right to be. Her question was ill-timed, but perfectly valid. Unfortunately, the subject of Anna aroused conflicting emotions inside him: the loyalty he owed to the Lasios, the guilt he could not quite dismiss, and the frustration he felt that his wife of a few hours was looking at him with puzzled rather than passion-filled eyes.

Flattening her hands on his shoulders, she tilted back her head. 'Then why won't you tell me who she was?'

'You know who she was,' he said with a harsh laugh that was no laugh at all. 'She was the lover of your lecherous father, and over twenty years his junior. Now let's forget her, and concentrate on us.' He pulled her hard against him. 'This is our wedding night, and arguing with you was not what I had in mind.'

He was being evasive, but he was also right. A few seconds of feminine insecurity and she had ruined the mood. Why hadn't she kept her mouth shut? Because she was curious about the mysterious Anna of the portrait. She sighed, answering her own question.

'I'd like to think that was a sigh for me, for sex,' Jake said dryly. 'But I rather think it is frustration of another sort: your insatiable curiosity about a certain painting.'

He had read her mind and she flushed a little, but there was no point in denying it.

He shrugged his broad shoulders, his austerely handsome face suddenly devoid of all expression. 'You want the truth? Why not? According to all the marriage pundits, it's the way to go for a good marriage and so far ours appears to be going nowhere fast.' His voice was sardonic. 'Anna was my foster-sister, and I loved her. I was there when she was born, I watched her grow into a beautiful young woman, and I saw her destroyed by your father. She imagined herself in love with him and for two years she thought he was going to marry her.'

Charlie paled as the full import of his words sank in. The relief she had felt that Anna had never been Jake's lover vanished as she realised the truth was much worse. An ex- lover could be forgotten, but a sister never.

When she had met Jake he'd told her the painting was the only one he wanted. Not surprising if, as Diego had said, Anna had died recently. She remembered the look in the girl's eyes. And she remembered the glazed look in Jake's when he'd looked at it. How he must have hated to see her exposed like that...

A host of moments with Jake spun in the whirlpool of her mind, and began to assume a different meaning. Their first night together. She recalled his coldness after they had made love, his questioning her as to what she thought about an older man taking a young woman as a lover. Naively she had thought he was referring to the twelve-year gap between them. Now she realized he must have been thinking of her father.

She caught her breath in shock. 'My God! You hated my father.' She stared at him in horror. 'I'm right, aren't I?'

'I never met him, but, yes, I hated him.' Jake slid a lean hand around her waist. 'But don't let it bother you.' His voice was almost mocking. 'The man is dead, as is Anna. And you are my wife.' His other hand stroked down her throat and deftly unfastened the choker so it fell unheeded to the floor before trailing lower to cup her breast, a thumb testing the hardening peak. 'And we have wasted enough time already.'

'No.' She tried to deny him, but her treacherous flesh was already craving more. 'Let go of me,' she said jaggedly in an atmosphere suddenly raw with sexual tension. 'We need to talk.'

'What you need is very evident.' His dark eyes slanted down to her naked breast, where the rigid tip was a real give-away, then back to her face. His mouth touched hers, very lightly. 'And it certainly isn't talk. It is me, cara .'

The arrogance of his comment and the truth of it mortified her and inflamed her temper at one and the same time. He admitted he hated her father and in the next breath expected her to fall into his arms. His conceit was monumental, and, twisting out of his hold, she took a hasty step back and crossed her arms defensively over her aching breasts.

She was an intelligent woman, and with hindsight suddenly a lot of little things he had said made sense. While she had been driven by an all-consuming desire, even love, for Jake straight into his bed, she was now forced to question what had been his real motivation. The day they had gone to the museum, he had joked about his motivation, and the answer, she saw now, had been enigmatic.