With that depressing thought, Daisy fell asleep.
A hand on her shoulder shook her half-awake. Daisy focused blearily on the photo album lodged mere inches in front of her face.
‘Who is that?’ Alessio enquired, a lean finger indicating the male standing beside her and a three-year-old Tara in one of the photos.
Daisy made an effort to concentrate. ‘That was George—’
‘And this character?’ Alessio flipped over a page.
Daisy focused uncertainly on another male face. ‘Daniel... I think.’
Another page turned. A giant yawn crept up on her as she peered at the handsome blond man whom Alessio was now indicating. She looked blank. ‘I don’t remember him—’
‘You don’t remember him? I’m not surprised!’ Alessio blistered down at her, making her jump in shock. ‘Tara gave me six albums. Every one of them is full of strange men! You could run an international dating agency out of the male contingent in your photographs!’
Daisy gazed up at him with wide, drowsy eyes filled with incomprehension.
‘Tara told me that you didn’t date, that you hardly ever went out...’
Daisy’s sleepy eyes opened even wider. She was shocked that her daughter could have told such a whopper. She had always enjoyed a reasonably healthy social life.
With a not quite steady hand, Alessio snapped the offending album shut. ‘I suspected a certain amount of exaggeration on that point.’ Scorching golden eyes raked her small, sleep-flushed face accusingly. ‘But I had no idea what she was covering up! What about the toy boy?’
‘Toy boy?’ Daisy repeated dazedly, hanging on every explosive word that emerged from between his bloodless, compressed lips.
‘He was the latest, wasn’t he?’ Alessio surveyed her with sudden, icy derision, anger reined in as his expressive mouth clenched as hard as a vice. ‘Dio...you’ve been sleeping around ever since you divorced me!’
As the door slammed on his exit, Daisy’s jaw dropped. Sleeping around? Was he crazy? Sex had just about wrecked her life at seventeen and she had learnt that lesson well. Casual intimacy was not for her. She might have had no shortage of male company over the years but she had never fallen in love again—hadn’t wanted to either, she acknowledged honestly—and it had always seemed easier to end relationships when they’d demanded more than she’d been prepared to give.
Janet, she reflected drowsily, might say that she had a fear of commitment that amounted to paranoia, but she herself thought that she had been very sensible. No man had caused her grief in thirteen years. She was proud of that record and not at all proud of the fact that she had been a mass of painful and grieving nerve-endings from the instant that Alessio had come back into her life.
Daisy shifted in voluptuous relaxation. The bed was very comfortable. Memory slowly stirred. A slight frown-line divided her brows. She had the oddest recollection of a meal being thrust under her nose when being forced to stay awake had felt like the cruellest torture. She had pleaded for the mercy of a bed.
And had Alessio really said, ‘If you don’t eat, you don’t sleep,’ and cut up a steak into tiny, bite-sized pieces while her head had sunk back down on the supporting heel of her hand and her eyelids had kept on closing no matter how hard she tried to keep them open? He had been so damnably domineering, but the chocolate gateau which had come next had melted in her mouth and for the first time in a week her stomach had felt settled instead of queasily empty.
They were in Italy... and Alessio was smouldering again but, unhappily, not in silence, she thought as she recalled that scene with the photo album. At nineteen, Alessio had told her that a boy who slept around was only gaining necessary masculine experience but that a girl who slept around was a tart. That might not be fair but that was life, he had informed her cheerfully. But Alessio could not find it within himself to be quite so cheerful now about the idea that he might have married a tart.
Daisy might have told the reassuring truth had she been asked, but she hadn’t been asked. Alessio was not prone to demanding direct answers on sensitive subjects. He was naturally devious. Being sneaky had put him into the hands of his equally sneaky daughter. Tara, bless her scheming and shrewd little Leopardi brain, had worked out exactly what her father wanted to hear and had given it to him in spades. Daisy felt no pity for Alessio. Her sex life... or indeed her lack of a sex life...was none of his business.
But, for her daughter’s sake, she had to make the best of this crazy marriage, she told herself staunchly. Thankfully, she was not the sort of female who made a six-act tragedy out of a broken cup, contrary to Alessio’s opinion. She lifted her feathery lashes and then froze. A stricken gasp was torn from her. All languor banished, Daisy jackknifed upright, her horrified gaze flying round the eerily familiar contours of the spacious room.
Vacating the bed in a flying leap, she wrenched back the curtains with impatient hands and looked out in disbelief at the formal gardens spread out below. Boxshaped parterres adorned with statures and fountains and huge planted stone urns ran up to the edges of a magnificent oak wood. Beyond the trees stretched the rolling verdure of the Tuscan hills.
The very first time Daisy had seen that magnificent view, she had been under the naive impression that she was having a guided tour of the palatial Leopardi summer home. Alessio’s parents had generally been in residence only at weekends. Daisy had been hugely intimidated by her luxurious surroundings. Having got her off balance, Alessio had easily overcome her shy, uncertain protests by smoothly locking his mouth to hers in heated persuasion and sweeping her off to bed to deprive her of her virginity...
But not before assiduously assuring her that he would not go one step further than she wanted him to, that she had only to say no and he would immediately stop. Daisy hadn’t been capable of vocalising a single word in the flood of passion which had followed. Alessio would naturally have worked that fact out beforehand. Even as a teenager, he had been ruthlessly well acquainted with her every weakness.
Daisy finally spun from the window and back into the present; trembling with outrage and discomfiture. How dared Alessio bring her back to the family villa in Tuscany? How could any man be so insensitive that he didn’t appreciate that this was the very last place she would want to revisit? This was where they had fallen in love, where they had played adult games of passion, blithely risking consequences that neither of them had been equipped to deal with.
She was standing beneath the shower in the adjoining bathroom before it occurred to her that thirteen years ago that bedroom had been his bedroom. Of course it wouldn’t still be his, she thought, scolding herself furiously for the fact that her impressionable heart had just skipped an entire beat. Instead of being clenched by horror, she had been clenched by excitement, she conceded with deep chagrin. But she would never allow herself to succumb to the potent lure of Alessio’s allpervasive sexuality again. A healthy distance and detachment would provide the only safe and sensible foundation for a marriage of convenience.
Daisy turned off the shower and towelled herself dry. Then, throwing the towel aside, she padded back into the bedroom. She was heading for the dressing room, where she hoped to find some clothing, when a light knock on the door momentarily froze her to the spot. She wasn’t wearing a stitch! As the doorhandle began turning, she gave a frantic, unavailing pull at the securely lodged sheet on the bed and then dived with a strangled groan under the massive bed to conceal herself. The rattle of china broke the silence. Daisy waited to see a pair of maid’s feet approaching but instead she saw male feet... unmistakably Alessio’s feet—bare, brown, beautifully shaped.
‘Daisy...?’ he called.
She held her breath and turned puce with mortification. Things like this did not happen to other people; why did they continually happen to her? Especially around Alessio, who would greet a hurricane in the middle of the night with a stopwatch. He checked the bathroom, the dressing room, muttered something in Italian.
Daisy couldn’t stand the suspense any longer. She cleared her throat. ‘I’m under the bed. For heaven’s sake, go away!’ she hissed in furious conclusion.
‘So... you are hiding under the bed,’ Alessio drawled after a lengthy pause, a slight tremor disturbing his diction.
‘I thought you were the maid.’
‘I know you used to feel a little self-conscious around the staff, piccola mia...but don’t you think this is rather excessive?’
‘If you must know, I haven’t got any clothes on!’ Daisy blitzed back.
‘Oh, I’m well aware of that,’ Alessio assured her huskily. ‘I was standing below the trees earlier when you hauled open the curtains and stood there in all your unclothed glory for an entire ten minutes.’
‘You timed me?’ Daisy could barely frame the scandalised demand.
‘I may not wax lyrical about sunrises or spout romantic speeches under balconies but I was deeply appreciative of that particular view. I also congratulated myself on my foresight that the domestic staff come in at only discreet hours of the day. We are presently the only people in the house—and isn’t it fortunate that I included the gardeners in that embargo? I don’t think I’m narrow-minded but I’m remarkably selfish. If you had even unwittingly flashed your attractions for anyone else, I would have wrung your neck!’