In a sudden movement that took Alessio by surprise, Daisy tore herself free of his restraining hand and stalked out of the room.
‘Dio...’ Bianca groaned in her wake. ‘If I’d known it was likely to cause this much trouble for you, I’d never have asked!’
Daisy raced up the stairs like a woman jet-propelled. Not one more moment would she spend in this house, not one more moment...not for Tara, not for anybody! She was getting out right now! Her breath catching in sobs in her throat, she trailed her still unpacked suitcase across the dressing-room floor and struggled to close it, stuffing in sleeves and protruding hems of clothing disarranged in her haste to get dressed only minutes earlier.
‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at now?’ Alessio enquired from the doorway.
Daisy jerked round on her knees, two spots of enraged colour burning over her cheekbones. ‘Get out of my way, you swine! No, you’re not a swine, you’re lower than that! You’re a snake—a sneaky, sly, double-dealing, stupid snake...because if you think I intend to stay here and put up with you, your girlfriend and your shrew of a sister you’re living in fantasy land!’
Alessio folded his arms and stood his ground. ‘You’re not going anywhere, piccola mia,’ he spelt out rawly.
‘Do you think that treating me like a child means you can ground me like one?’ Daisy launched back, angrier than she had ever been in her life, her eyes burning an incandescent violet challenge.
‘I think that if I strip you naked, trash all your clothes and keep you locked in the bedroom you’ll find it a little difficult to stray beyond these walls.’
‘You wouldn’t dare!’ Daisy told him, flying furiously upright.
‘Try me,’ Alessio invited with soft menace, his shimmering eyes striking threatening sparks off her incredulous stare. ‘When my daughter’s happiness is at risk, I don’t think there is anything that I wouldn’t dare.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means that the day you walk out on this marriage I start fighting to keep Tara in Italy with me. I will not be shut out of her life again,’ Alessio asserted with harsh emphasis.
Daisy went white with shock, a shiver of cold fear slithering down her rigid spine. That uncompromising threat electrified her. All of a sudden, Bianca’s spiteful allegations no longer seemed quite so fanciful. Alessio was already letting her know that if their marriage failed he would fight to retain custody of their daughter. Was it at all possible that he might also be planning to use Daisy for as long as he needed her to get Tara settled in... before dispensing with her services as a wife and mother altogether? Or was that a paranoid suspicion?
‘You are scaring me,’ Daisy muttered in a surge of involuntary candour.
‘Maybe you scare me when you haul out a suitcase barely twenty-four hours after you say “I do” for the second time!’ Alessio was very pale beneath his golden skin but fierce determination harshly delineated his sculpted bone structure. ‘Now, I don’t expect you to become bosom pals with my sister but I do expect a mature acceptance that my family are also Tara’s family and that when she arrives here at the end of the week she does not need to be dragged into the midst of some continuing, petty war that started before she was even born!’
‘I did not restart the war.’
Alessio spread his lean, strong hands in a bold arc of impatience with a subject he clearly considered beneath his notice. ‘I will not allow Tara to come home to us for the first time and find a hostile atmosphere—’
‘And what are you intending to do to improve that atmosphere?’ A laugh that was no laugh at all escaped Daisy as she recalled the humiliation of his earlier rejection. Fighting blindly to conserve her pride, torn with savage pain and confusion, she thrust up her chin in defiance. ‘I hate you, Alessio. I really hate you for what you’ve done to me today!’
‘Or maybe you hate me for what I didn’t do!’ Throwing her off balance, Alessio cast an explicit and suggestive glance back towards the disordered bed. Bold eyes flaming over her, he murmured thickly, ‘I can hardly believe now that I walked away from temptation.’
Affected more than she could bear by that mercurial change of mood and direction, her breasts rising and falling with the accelerated pace of her breathing, Daisy said with hoarse emphasis, ‘You’ll get your face slapped if you try to walk back again!’
‘When did that prospect ever inhibit me?’ Alessio flashed her a look of sudden vibrant amusement. ‘You ought to know by now that I relish a challenge.’
Without the smallest warning, Daisy’s heart turned a somersault and her mouth went dry.
A wolfish smile curved Alessio’s mobile mouth. ‘But you can relax. You’re safe for the moment. The staff are waiting to serve lunch.’
‘Lunch?’ Daisy echoed foolishly.
With difficulty, she tore her gaze from the intense lure of those entrapping golden eyes. All over again she was devastated by her inability to control or suppress her powerful sexual response to him.
‘Our unwelcome guests will be busy in the grounds. We’ll be alone,’ Alessio pointed out soothingly.
‘Unwelcome?’ Daisy queried tautly, uncertainly.
‘Dio...surely you don’t imagine that I wanted this three-act circus descending on us?’ Alessio’s mouth twisted with expressive incredulity. ‘But they’ll be gone soon enough.’
‘Why did Bianca need your permission to use the grounds?’ Daisy prompted on the way downstairs, her outrage at the situation ebbing a little as she appreciated that Alessio was no more pleased by the invasion than she was.
‘I own the villa now. When Vittorio decided to sell, I bought.’
‘So what has your sister got to do with a fashion shoot?’
‘Three months ago she became the owner of a photographic studio. She’s trying very hard to make a mark on the fashion world. Nina’s a top model,’ Alessio explained. ‘Bianca needs her star quality to sell this layout and as Nina is a friend of the family she agreed to help.’
Daisy reconsidered the view she had had of Nina and Alessio together, belatedly conceding that she had seen nothing that might not be described as an affectionate greeting. ‘Nina...is a family friend?’
‘Our parents move in the same social circles.’
‘I saw you with her,’ Daisy heard herself admit with shocking abruptness. ‘She was all over you like chickenpox!’
Alessio shifted a broad shoulder beneath Daisy’s piercing sideways scrutiny. ‘Nina is very demonstrative. Showbiz-type personalities usually are. And, to be frank, cara, she’s behaving generously. I was seeing her up until very recently.’ He delivered the reminder with a hint of reproof.
Horrified to be riven with a white-hot streak of jealousy, Daisy found herself surveying her meal with little appetite. Just knowing that the beautiful, generous Nina was around made her feel deeply insecure. Only this morning she had been telling herself that she could handle a marriage of convenience, but already she was drowning in an emotional morass of pain and confusion. Why was it that no other man had ever had the power to tear at her heart with one teasing smile and stop it beating altogether by the simple act of donning a pair of jeans?
Having dismissed the staff, Alessio replenished her wine with his own hand. Daisy watched those long, lean, denim-clad legs advancing and momentarily shut her eyes in despair, because every treacherous pulse in her body was pounding insanely fast.
‘You’re not eating,’ Alessio commented tautly.
‘Maybe what I want isn’t on the plate,’ Daisy said wildly, loathing herself for her own bodily weakness. She was turning into a sex-starved animal but she would leave him, stark naked if necessary, before she allowed him to find that out!
‘Just tell me what you want and I’ll order it for you.’
Daisy gave an agonised little quiver, her imagination leaving her suspended between heaven and hell. ‘I’m not hungry—’
‘You haven’t eaten since last night!’ Alessio grated. ‘Do you have a problem with food?’
‘What is this thing you have about my eating habits?’
Alessio shot her a look of exasperation ‘I knew a girl with anorexia nervosa at university. Sophia... Sophia Corsini, now, she—’
That particular name did grab Daisy’s full attention. ‘Your girlfriend was anorexic?’ she cut in sharply.
‘Sophia was in most of my classes but I never dated her,’ Alessio countered with a faint frown of distaste and surprise at the suggestion. ‘She was one very mixedup kid. She dropped out in the middle of our second year.’
Her eyes lowering from his, Daisy mulled over that calm explanation. She believed him. Colour rose slowly in her cheeks. Bianca had made up a story and Daisy had foolishly swallowed it without demanding evidence or confronting Alessio. Clearly, there had been no other girl involved in the breakup of their first marriage. And yet hadn’t she been ready to give credence to Bianca’s spiteful allegations a second time? Should she tell Alessio what had really happened with his sister? Would he believe her? she wondered ruefully. Bianca was a very overprotective and possessive twin, but clever enough to hide it. Daisy was almost certain that she had been treated to a side of Bianca that Alessio had yet to experience.