Vicenzo Valentini stood by the threadbare couch in a wide-legged, dominantly powerful stance. Dark jeans hugged hard thighs, and a dark polo shirt and well-worn brown leather jacket made him look devilish and so gorgeous that she felt winded. She couldn’t speak as she stood on the threshold and took him in. She didn’t even bother to formulate the question as to how he might have got in.
He looked at her with no discernible expression. Only a muscle twitching in his jaw told her he was far from happy. He held out a white piece of paper and asked, almost conversationally, ‘Why is Sebastian Mortimer blackmailing you?’
The letter.
‘How dare you snoop through my private things?’ Panic flooded Cara, galvanizing her, and she marched over to snatch it out of his hand. But Vicenzo caught her arm and held the letter well out of reach.
‘Why is Sebastian Mortimer blackmailing you?’ he repeated with a steely tone.
‘Because I didn’t sleep with him,’ Cara spat out. She tried to jerk her arm away from his grip but he wouldn’t let her go. She held herself tensely and glared up at him, feeling horribly exposed; if he still doubted her word about that then he still didn’t believe she’d been a virgin. This man was so dangerous to her now, in so many ways, but she had to defend herself. His misconception of her character was so bad that she knew even if he believed her explanation about Mortimer she’d remain in the gutter in his eyes. She had nothing to lose.
‘He paid off Cormac’s debts without my knowledge and came to me presenting it as a fait accompli. He hoped that I’d show my gratitude by…’ She swallowed the bile. ‘By becoming his live-in mistress.’ She shuddered lightly as she remembered how close he’d come to forcing himself on her.
Vicenzo still held Cara’s arm, and absurdly she felt somehow protected.
It confused her in the midst of the shock at seeing him here and his obvious disbelief.
‘The thought didn’t appeal then?’
She shook her head mutely, trying to gauge what was going on in that dangerous mind of his. She glanced at the letter. ‘He’s threatening to revert the debt back into my name if I don’t change my mind.’
Vicenzo’s face was like stone. ‘He was obviously confident enough of your response, however, to pay in advance.’
Cara stung at his quick condemnation—a repetition of what he’d said to her on that morning two months ago. The truth was that Sebastian Mortimer was an arrogant sociopath who had an inflated notion of his own attractiveness. As Cormac’s confidant, he’d been aware of Cara’s vulnerable position and had counted on it, assuming she’d go along with his plans. When she hadn’t, he’d turned nasty in an instant.
‘Well,’ she bit out painfully, ‘he didn’t get the response he expected.’
Vicenzo frowned suddenly, and his hand tightened. ‘Did he hurt you?’
Cara sucked in a breath at the way he suddenly bristled. She couldn’t halt the awful memory of Mortimer coming closer and closer, the panic as she’d tried to placate him, her search for an escape route in the face of his huge overweight bulk coming ever nearer. And then he’d reached her, his mouth in a lascivious grin…
She willed the memory down and shook her head hurriedly.
‘No…He…the concierge came to the door. I was able to get rid of him before anything happened.’
Vicenzo looked at Cara carefully. She was avoiding his eye, but to his surprise in that moment he didn’t doubt that the terror he’d seen cross her face was real, as if she’d been reliving something. He quelled the protective surge that came from nowhere rational. But on the back of that came the heavy sinking weight of realization—he believed her. And that was largely because he’d finally had to concede last night that he also believed she’d been a virgin. The signs he’d ignored that night couldn’t be denied.
And yet why hadn’t she taken what Mortimer had offered? He felt her quiver lightly under his hand and his natural cynicism asserted itself. He welcomed it almost with relief. She must have believed she’d hook a bigger fish—after all, what else had she been doing in the club that night?
And he, like a prize fool, had been it…
Cara realised that her breath was coming swift and fast. Her body’s reaction to seeing Vicenzo again was disturbing. She finally pulled free of his grip and put some distance between them, standing near the kitchen area. Defusing the reaction in her body with all her strength, she said,
‘And before you accuse me of it, I had nothing to do with that media circus last night. Someone in the ballroom must have tipped them off.’
Vicenzo allowed his unpalatable thoughts to be diverted momentarily, and quirked an incredulous brow as he stepped forward. Cara took a hasty step back towards her tiny adjoining kitchen.
‘What? No little whispered words before you came in to drop your public bombshell?’ He shook his head. ‘Sorry, I don’t buy it for a second. You orchestrated the whole thing because you’ve now seen a way to claim the ultimate prize for yourself. After all, even if Allegra had married your brother, her inheritance is only a slice of what I own. You’re a smart girl.
You would’ve figured that out the minute you knew who I was. You must have congratulated yourself on your gamble to keep your virginity for the highest bidder—or was it just that Mortimer disgusted you physically and your brother’s death necessitated the need to dispose of it quickly?
Perhaps,’ he drawled, clearly not finished, ‘you were planning on going to back to Mortimer if you didn’t find a more attractive, wealthier protector?’
Everything in Cara seized at his insulting words. She felt so dizzy for a second she thought she might pass out. Anger and pain, pure and white-hot, surged upwards. ‘You absolute—’
‘Ah-ah.’ He stopped her, coming even closer.
His presence was huge and threatening, and yet Cara realised she didn’t feel physically threatened—not the way Mortimer had made her feel.
This was a very different threat, and it had a lot to do with the way her body seemed to be full of tiny fiery magnets, all wanting to go in one direction towards him. And it killed her.
He stopped a few feet away, his face hard and implacable, taut with the distaste he obviously felt to be here, facing her again, when he’d believed that he’d washed his hands of her. It made something very vulnerable within Cara ache.
‘The story of a Valentini heir is already all over the press here and in the Italian news. It’s going to be impossible to deny without creating an even bigger storm.’
‘And why would you want to deny it? It’s true.’ Her voice rang with bitterness—her own bitterness for having created exactly this situation.
While on the one hand she wanted nothing more than to laugh it all off—
tell him she wasn’t pregnant—she was. And she felt inordinately protective of this tiny being. She had to take responsibility for her actions, and to deny the truth of her pregnancy here in front of the father was anathema to her.
Vicenzo looked away for a second and ran an impatient hand through his short hair, leaving it disheveled. When he looked back his eyes were utterly ruthless, utterly cold. ‘Do you have proof?’
Hurt sliced through her again, but she nodded warily. She’d kept her doctor’s note of when the baby was most likely due, the lists of what foods to avoid, what supplements to take the date of her first hospital appointment. She went to her bag, which she’d dropped on the tiny chipped table, and dug out the piece of headed paper.
With her slim back to him for a moment, Vicenzo took in the flat properly for the first time. It was…shocking. Damp climbed one wall like an insidious mottled disease. The window looking out onto a dark alley was cracked, with a whistle of a breeze coming through. Mangy curtains.
Her motive for coming after him was glaring, and the fact that he’d provided her with that motive stung bitterly.
Cara straightened and turned, coming back to him holding out a piece of paper. He willed down his reaction to the flat. Her pale face, with freckles standing out starkly, made her look vulnerable and impossibly young.
He took the piece of paper and his eyes flicked over the words. All apparent proof that she was indeed pregnant. It didn’t take him long to work out that the due date tied in all too perfectly with that night in London. The headed paper looked genuine, and the writing was in a typical doctor’s illegible scrawl, dated almost a week ago. He could seek out the doctor, get further proof, but a sinking feeling told him it wasn’t necessary. The very real possibility that he was facing impending fatherhood was making him slightly numb.
Cara crossed her arms and said tightly, ‘See? So, unless I ran straight to another man’s bed—which I didn’t…’ She took a quivering breath, the full import of this moment hitting her suddenly. ‘The baby is yours.’
Vicenzo looked at her sharply, as if he’d heard something in her voice, and Cara did feel a little strange suddenly—as if everything was coming from far away. She heard him say something unintelligible, and before she knew it she was sitting at the table, Vicenzo putting a glass of water in front of her.