‘I heard a scream,’ Tara intervened. ‘Mum...?’
‘Your mother has scalded herself. Where’s the bathroom?’ Alessio countered.
Thirty seconds later, Daisy found herself standing in the bath with Tara aiming the shower head at her bare thighs to cool the smarting flesh with cold water. Tears of mortification had now taken over from momentary tears of pain. Alessio was rustling, tight-mouthed with disapproval, through a first-aid box crammed with cosmetics.
‘You’re really cool in a crisis,’ Tara was saying appreciatively to her father. As she took her attention off what she was doing, the gushing water angled up to drench Daisy’s T-shirt as well. ‘I did a first-aid course last summer but I wouldn’t have remembered what to do so quickly.’
‘I’m all right now,’ Daisy murmured in desperation, cringing with embarrassment.
‘You need at least ten minutes of that treatment,’ Alessio overruled.
‘At least ten minutes. He’s right, Mum,’ Tara added, sounding like a little echo.
‘It was a very minor scald. The coffee wasn’t that hot.’ Daisy was trying somewhat hopelessly to tug the too small T-shirt down over a pair of minuscule white pants which were probably transparent now that they were wet.
‘You screamed,’ her daughter reminded her. ‘You scared me!’
‘Don’t tell me Daisy hasn’t done that to you before. She’s accident-prone but wonderfully resilient,’ Alessio put in reassuringly. ‘She came off my motorbike twice without breaking anything.’
‘Mum just hasn’t got very good spatial awareness,’ Tara told him informatively. ‘Aunt Janet thinks it’s because she was born weeks before she should have been. That’s probably why she’s so small and skinny as well. It was a real miracle that she survived. I mean thirty years ago a lot of premature babies died! I was only a couple of weeks early. It didn’t harm me but Aunt Janet said that Mum’s development was definitely affected—’
‘I thought you were tired,’ Daisy slotted into the flood of chatter, feeling older, smaller, skinnier, clumsier and less adequate than she had in years.
‘Yes, you should go back to bed,’ Alessio agreed, a slight tremor disturbing his smooth drawl. ‘I can handle this.’
Daisy wondered if her legs were turning blue. They were numb. The bathroom was freezing cold too. But it was no use; she couldn’t block out that shattering announcement one minute longer. ‘We will get married again.’ Though every rational thought denied that Alessio could have said that, she knew he had said it. And that unapologetic arrogance was at least familiar. Only the last time Alessio had told her that they were getting married Daisy had had no problem with being told rather than asked...
She had been weak with relief and, indeed, it hadn’t been very long before she’d begun feeling incredibly happy that she was going to stay on in Italy as his wife and share as many of his waking and sleeping moments as she could possibly manage. Sadly, her sunny belief that Alessio would soon reach that same blissful state of acceptance hadn’t lasted much beyond their wedding night, when she had had the poor taste to joke that she felt like Cinderella.
Alessio had looked at her for the very first time as if he could quite happily have strangled her. His wonderful sense of humour had vanished when he’d put that fatal ring on her finger and it had not reappeared. But had she then sown the first seed of his suspicion that she had been plotting all along to acquire a share of the Leopardi wealth? Daisy reflected that she could truthfully put her hand on her heart and assert that the very last thing that had ever been on her mind when Alessio had been making love to her was money...
Daisy emerged from an undeniably erotic reverie to find her T-shirt being whipped off. She emitted a strangled moan of protest just as her equally sodden bra was tugged down her arms. Alessio wrapped a towel round her bare, pouting breasts, met her outraged eyes and said tautly, ‘You’re cold and wet. I couldn’t undress you in front of Tara. It would have embarrassed her.’
He sank down on the corner of the bath and directed the shower head at her shivering legs, and then his smooth dark head angled down and a lean hand settled on her hip to twist her round. ‘Where the hell did you get those bruises?’ he demanded thunderously.
‘On the stairs at the bank.’ Daisy was resigned to humiliation now but striving not to show that it mattered.
‘Didn’t I tell you to watch out?’ Alessio gritted. ‘Didn’t I warn you?’
‘Yes... you’re always right,’ Daisy muttered with a speaking lack of appreciation.
He switched off the water and minutely examined her goose-fleshed thighs for patches of scalded pink. ‘Do you feel any heat anywhere?’ he finally enquired.
‘Are you joking?’
‘It could have been a lot worse.’ It was quite beyond Alessio to admit that he had overreacted.
He lifted her out of the bath and hunkered lithely down to pat her trembling legs as gently and carefully dry as if she were a baby. Daisy submitted, suddenly so choked up by tears that she was undyingly grateful that it was her skinny thighs that had all his attention. Below the discreet cover of the hip-length towel, her wet pants were tugged smoothly down. She didn’t notice, for beneath the overhead light Alessio’s black hair had the extraordinary iridescent sheen and lure of pure silk and involuntarily Daisy was entrapped by that compulsive view. She wanted to touch those gleaming strands so badly that her fingers tingled and she had to fold her arms tightly because, for a split second, she really didn’t trust herself not to surrender to temptation.
It didn’t even occur to her to wonder why Alessio was making her stand on one foot and then the other as the damp scrap of lingerie was deftly wafted away, for Daisy was by then in a hot-cheeked fever of self-loathing. Shame was flaming through her in punitive waves. She despised her physical weakness in Alessio’s vicinity. What had been excusable at a sexually naive and besotted seventeen was in no way allowable in a grown woman of thirty. Raw resentment suddenly filled her to overflowing. She couldn’t understand how she could still be so disgustingly susceptible. One attack of Alessio ought to have conferred lifelong immunity.
And how dared he come into her home and upbraid her for her failings? He had given up on their relationship first, hadn’t he? What possible future could he have envisaged for their marriage when he had already been consoling himself with Sophia? Why hadn’t she faced him with that fact? But she knew why, didn’t she? She couldn’t have mentioned that final betrayal without revealing just how deeply she had been hurt by it. And, thirteen years on, she was too proud to expose herself to that extent.
Secure in the belief that she was ignorant of his extramarital activities, Alessio was aggressively determined to load her down with so much guilt that she wouldn’t dare to fight back. And why had she not yet said a word about that insane proposition he had made? Marry Alessio again? Always honest with herself, Daisy could think of several things Alessio might be able to persuade her to do in a weak moment, but a second trip to hell and back was definitely not one of them.
‘You should be in bed too,’ Alessio said very quietly. ‘You’re exhausted.’
Banging his head against a brick wall...she reflected furiously. Just how much affronted dignity could one effectively portray standing naked in a towel with intimate items of apparel scattered round one’s feet? Particularly one intimate item that she didn’t even recall being removed! She could almost feel Alessio consciously tempering his powerful emotions to the constraints of the situation. If she hadn’t been hurt, she knew he would have been laughing uproariously at what had happened. Instead he was practising tact. She hated him for that even more.
‘Tell me you weren’t crazy enough to say that we should get married again,’ she begged, hugging the towel round herself as if it were a suit of armour.
‘We’ll discuss that tomorrow.’
‘But there’s nothing to discuss,’ Daisy returned flatly.
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘There isn’t!’ Stalking out of the bathroom, Daisy returned to the lounge and plonked herself down. Why was she now thinking that for the very first time Alessio had taken off her clothes and failed to make the smallest pass? she asked herself. Was there something wrong with her brain? Was she becoming obsessed with sex? He had been very impersonal about it, too, but teeth-clenchingly considerate. He had averted his attention from her naked body. Why had that only made her squirm more? Why did her ego suddenly feel as if it had been weekending in a concrete mixer?
‘Daisy...’ Alessio breathed tautly.
Daisy rigorously studied the wall to the left of him, and when he moved into that space found another section of wall. ‘If you’ve got something you feel you have to say, say it now and get it over with. I have no intention of making myself available tomorrow.’
‘Your towel’s slipping...’
Her cheeks burning, Daisy snatched the towel higher over the embarrassingly full thrust of her breasts. She fixed accusing violet eyes on him. ‘I want you to know that until this evening I truly believed that there was no sacrifice I would not make for my daughter’s benefit. But there is one. I would give her every last drop of blood in my body, but I would throw myself under a bus before I would marry her father again!’