The Veranchetti Marriage(20)

“I saw you from my bedroom window.” Alex dragged her small hands down and forced them to her sides. In the shadowy light, a hard-boned savagery clung to his taut, golden features. “You flaunt yourself…you go too far…”

“F…Flaunt myself?” she echoed incredulously, mortified to learn that she had had an audience. “You rotten…voyeur!”

His hands dug into the sodden mane of her hair. “Dio, I do not receive satisfaction from watching,” he scorned. “But I’m entitled to take it when my wife plays at provocation.” His mouth connected hotly with a hollow in her throat. “Your skin gleams like wet silver in this light.” His hands skimmed down, not quite steadily, to the full globes of her breasts. “And I find that I am very much a man…”

“I never doubted it, but you promised!” she objected shrilly, a spasm of terrifying excitement shooting through her tremulous body.

“So I am human,” Alex grated in unashamed excuse, involved in a scorching trailpath across her smooth ivory shoulders, pausing to nip at her earlobe before stabbing his tongue in a hungry thrust between her lips, and she quivered. Great breakers of anticipation washed over her in response.

The water eddied noisily round them as he pressed her closer still to his virile length. He did not have a stitch on either. A constricting pain tightened her stomach muscles on a wild, remorseless rush of pleasure.

“No…” She fought her own weakness in desperation. Her palms braced against his shoulders in a fleeting gesture of protest, and then breathlessly, mindlessly, her hands began moving down in slow connection with his damp skin, her fingertips tangling in the black whorls of hair sprinkling the breadth of his chest. With an earthy groan of approval he pressed her hand down over his flat stomach to demonstrate his need, and she capitulated without thought. She was starved of him, almost frantic in the cruel hold of the desire he had unleashed within both of them.

Suddenly he was sweeping her up and wading towards the steps. He cast her down across the bed in his own unlit room, lowering himself down to her again with primal grace. “When I saw you in that hospital, I knew it wasn’t over. I looked at you,” he cited in a husky, accented growl. “And I knew I had to have you again. You’re in my blood like a fever and I’m in yours.”

His fingers spread her wet hair over the white woven counterpane, and he ran his hot, burnished gaze over her ivory slenderness. She felt like a sacrifice of old. It was insanity but she was spellbound. There was a wild, womanly joy to the discovery that Alex was as entrapped as she was. It seemed to make them equal. And when he bent over her, her lips parted by instinct to welcome his.



KERRY HAD A THUMPING headache when she woke up. She crawled weakly over the bed to squint in dull-eyed disbelief at the clock. She was back in her own room. Her nightdress lay on the chair as if she had never put it on, never taken it off. The curtains were firmly closed on the brilliant light of midday. It was as if the whole of the previous night had been a figment of her imagination. But the ache and the languor of her body told her otherwise.

Had it been a dream that there had been something magical about those hours? Why had she pretended to herself that she could resist Alex? He had put the heat on and she had scorched. She had burnt up in an inferno, incapable of denying him.

Ahead of her stretched a never-ending roundabout of falls from grace and morning-after attacks of conscience. She swallowed hard as she thought about all the affairs Alex had had since their divorce. Distaste rippled through her. She was her own worst enemy still. Why had she ever blamed him?

“Sleep well?” Alex lifted his blue-black head from a perusal of a Greek newspaper and watched her walk across the terrace.

“Yes.” Her eyes searched his cool, dark features in search of a smile, a greater warmth.

“Good.” Alex went back to his newspaper quickly. “Could you tell Sofia that I’d appreciate lunch soon?”

Disconcertingly, her eyes glazed over with tears. She glanced down at the pale blue sundress she had carefully selected from her wardrobe and, spinning, she went back into the house. Last night Alex had slept with his wife. What had she expected? A magnificent bouquet of flowers on her pillow? Some romantic, loving gesture? What had happened might have been important to her, but it wasn’t to him. She ought to have reminded herself that Alex’s raw energy found a natural vent in sex. And, as he had said, why should he not use her as he had accused her of once using him?

She mumbled to Sofia about lunch and mentioned a headache in the same breath, requesting a tray in her room. Her distraught reflection in the mirror there seemed to taunt her. How many times had she sought her soul in a mirror during the years since she had met Alex? How many times had she asked herself why her life was in such turmoil?

The pain and the anxiety had always melted down to the same source. Love. Such a cruel emotion to the unlucky. It was love which was stalking her like Nemesis now. She had never managed to kill her love for Alex. She had dug the weakness down deep and sought to bury it, but it had lingered, preventing her from finding peace even with herself. When had loving Alex ever caused her anything but pain? She did not marvel at her own reluctance to admit her vulnerability. Pride and simple fear had warred against the admission.

“Sofia tells me that you are not feeling well.”

“It’s just a headache. I’ll lie down for an hour.” Her voice emerged perfectly normally and she turned.

Alex was on the threshold, dark and tawny and compellingly masculine. Concern showed clearly in his narrowed, probing scrutiny.

“Leave me, I’ll be fine,” she insisted when he continued to stare.

“Are you in love with Steven Glenn?”

The unexpectedness of the quiet demand took her by surprise. His eyes were cool and level. The weather might have been under discussion.

“Why should you think that?”

His arrogant head tilted back, black hair gleaming in the filtered sunshine. “I was curious, and it’s wiser if we don’t have any secrets between us.”

“You’ve got everything else, Alex,” she heard herself riposte drily. “I’m afraid you don’t have access to my every thought too.”

Fury glittered in his gaze. The illusion of cool was abruptly cast aside. “Then you will understand if I prevent you from returning to England in the foreseeable future,” he delivered crushingly.

As he withdrew, the door rocked on its hinges. A sick tide of bitterness rose like bile within her. How could he think that she could love another man and still abandon herself to him? It certainly clarified Alex’s view of her. As far as Alex was concerned, she was enslaved by her own promiscuous nature. Already he was suspecting his conviction that there had been no other men. He would have her watched like a thief when he was abroad. He would never trust her out of his sight. But she understood why he could live with her moral deficiency. It was her weakness, not his. Had his surveillance of her life included a photo of Steven? A humourless smile curved her lips. Steven was a very handsome man. Well, let Alex live with his suspicions! Steven was at a safe distance. If Alex had to distrust her, Steven was a harmless focus.

When she returned to the terrace after lunch, Alex was not there.

“Kyrios Veranchetti has gone fishing.” Sofia answered her enquiry cheerfully.

She got a pair of binoculars and located him out in the bay.

“He with old Andreas like when he was a boy,” Sofia burbled, sketching an impossibly miniature Alex with a workworn hand.

She could see two figures in the shabby caique. Sunlight glinted off a can of beer in Alex’s hand. She put the binoculars away guiltily and spent the afternoon sunbathing. He came back just before dinner, angling her a flashing, sensual smile on his way past. “I won’t take long to change.”

He talked with animation over the meal. Their earlier conversation might never have happened. As she went to bed, she was wondering how she was to survive another decade of Alex’s supreme self-sufficiency. He didn’t care if she loved another man. He had her in body, he didn’t need her in spirit, too. She was almost asleep when he came to her. Her drowsy, muffled protest was silenced by the tender caress of his mouth. If he had been storm and passion the night before, he was seduction and silence now. But this time she was agonisingly conscious of his withdrawal afterwards. He quietly removed himself back to his own room. Actually sleeping with her appeared to be an intimacy Alex could not bring himself to contemplate.

She woke up to the sound of the helicopter landing. When she walked out on to the terrace Alex was chattering in Italian on the phone, and two dark-suited men, one standing, one sitting, were with him. Her colour evaporated as she recognised one of them. The older one with the greying hair was Roberto Carreras, the lawyer Alex had sent to Florence with the separation papers. Just looking at the man brought back hideous recollections.

“Some coffee, kyrie?” Sofia bustled past, carrying a laden tray, and the men turned their heads, seeing her slim figure for the first time. It was too late to retreat.

Carreras immediately stood, his suave features betraying not an ounce of discomfiture as he politely spun out his chair for her. “Buon giorno, signora,” he said, and passed some meaningless comment on the magnificent view.