The Heat Of Passion
It was too late to go barging in on her father. Tomorrow morning first thing, she would be on his doorstep, and if he hadn’t seen a lawyer yet she would see that he did. It was a crisis and she was good in a crisis. For years it seemed her life had lurched from one crisis to another.
She was about to phone her father when the doorbell went. She peered through the peephole and recognised the broad, weathered features of the heavily built man on the other side of the door.
‘Dr Guthrie ... ?’ Her brow furrowed. Henry Guthrie was one of her father’s oldest friends. He and his wife ran a private nursing home.
‘I tried to ring you earlier but you were out,’ he proffered.
‘What’s wrong?’ she demanded, anxiously scanning his troubled face.
‘Your father’s going to stay with us for a day or two until- I can get him sorted out—’
‘But why... mean, I gather you know what’s happened... but what’s the matter with him?’ Jessica prompted sickly.
Henry Guthrie sighed. ‘Gerald’s been receiving treatment for depression for some months, now—’
She paled. ‘He didn’t tell me...’
‘He’s been quietly going off the rails ever since your mother died.’
She shut her eyes and groaned. Four months ago, they had received news of her mother’s death in a car crash. From the day she walked out until the day she died, neither Jessica nor her father had had any contact with Carole. Her mother hadn’t wanted any contact. She had wiped them both out of her life and had embarked on a new life abroad.
‘But he seemed to take it so well,’ she protested shakily.
‘Didn’t it ever occur to you that he took it too well?’ the older man murmured. ‘I think that he still hoped that she would come back. But when she died, he had to finally face that she was gone. That’s when the depression came and the gambling started. Now I understand he’s got himself in one hell of a mess—’
‘Yes,’ she whispered, tears stinging her eyes.
‘He just can’t cope with it, Jess,’ Dr Guthrie sighed. ‘He took some sleeping tablets this afternoon—’
Jessica gasped at him in horror. ‘He did what?’
‘Not enough to kill him but then, he didn’t have enough. His housekeeper found him lying in the hall and thought he’d had a heart attack...’
Jessica collapsed down on the sofa behind her, sick to her stomach, and bowed her head.
‘She rang me. I saw the tablets and contacted his own doctor, worked out how many he must have taken and between us ... well, we decided the nursing home would be a better choice than the local hospital.’
Tracks of moisture ran unchecked down her cheeks. She wanted to thank the older man for exercising that discretion but she couldn’t find her voice.
‘Now when he came to, he swore he hadn’t been trying to harm himself. He said he was just desperate to stop his mind going round and round and get some sleep and when the first pills didn’t do the trick, he took a few more...’
‘Do you b-believe him?’
‘I’ll know better what to think in a few days when we’ve talked some more,’ he confessed wryly. ‘Well...now I’m here to ask you how to get in touch with this character, Saracini—-’
‘Carlo?’ she gasped.
‘Do you think he’d see me? I want to tell him that Gerald needs criminal charges right now like he needs a hole in the head!’ he delivered grimly.
Jessica was barely thinking straight. But one awareness dominated the morass of emotions tearing her apart. Tonight she might have lost her father. And even if it hadn’t been a suicide attempt, in his current condition, who was to say he mightn’t make such an attempt this week or next week or the week after? If he wasn’t coping now, how could she expect him to cope when the police were involved and the news of his disgrace leaked out? How could he handle all the horrors still to come?
She cleared her throat. ‘There’ aren’t going to be any criminal charges. I... saw Carlo tonight and he was very understanding—’
‘He wasn’t very understanding when he had Gerald tossed out of the building!’
‘I explained how much strain Dad had been under. There won’t be any court case,’ she repeated unsteadily, her slender hands twisting together as she made her decision.
‘But what about the money? I gather that Gerald has no hope of paying all of it back...’
‘Carlo is prepared to write it off—’
‘He must be a very decent sort of man: Dr Guthrie shook his head. ’I honestly thought he would want to nail your father’s hide to the wall as an example to the rest of his employees...’
An inward quaking at that particular image assailed Jessica. She tasted cold fear but this time it was not only for her father, it was for herself as well.
The older man smothered a yawn and stood up. ‘I’ll pass on the good news to Gerald:
‘I’ll come and see him tomorrow.’
Dr Guthrie grimaced. ‘Would you be terribly hurt if I advised you to give him a couple of days to get himself together again?’
‘No,’ she lied.
‘He feels he’s let you down and I don’t think he wants you to see him until he has himself under control again.’
‘No problem,’ she said stiffly.
‘He still has a lot to handle, Jess. He’s lost his job and his self-respect.’
As soon as the older man had gone, Jessica dialled the Deangate Hotel with clumsy fingers. She asked for Carlo’s suite. He answered the call with a growl of impatience in his voice.
‘It’s me...‘ she said tightly. ’I’ve changed my mind:
Silence buzzed on the line for long seconds. It went on and on and on while she trembled at her end of the phone with a heady mix of fear and despair. Maybe Carlo had never expected her to accept... maybe Carlo had been playing some sort of game with her.
‘I’ll send a car over to collect you.’ There was no emotion whatsoever in his response. She couldn’t believe her ears.
‘When?’
‘Now.’
‘Now?’ she echoed incredulously.
‘Now,’ he repeated, his accent more pronounced than she had ever heard it. ‘I waited six years. I won’t wait one hour or one day longer.’
‘I can’t come over to your hotel at this time of night,’ Jessica gasped.
‘Why not?’ His deep, dark voice thickened audibly. ‘You won’t be going home again...’
Jessica was shattered. Now...tonight?
‘And if you don’t come tonight, the deal’s off.’
‘That’s totally unreasonable!’
‘But what I want,’ Carlo asserted.
‘You can’t always have what you want—’
‘Can’t I?’ He laughed softly and the phone went dead.
CHAPTER THREE
JESSICA kept the car waiting an hour. She packed as though she was going away for the weekend. In the back of her mind, a voice kept on saying, You can’t be doing this... you can’t have agreed. The unknown beckoned with all the welcome of a black, endless tunnel. She lifted a photo of Simon off the night stand and stared at it tautly. It had been taken the day he opened the photographic studio. Unusually, he was wearing a suit. A slim, fair man of medium height with gentle brown eyes.
‘It doesn’t matter to me... that sort of thing is really not important,’ Simon had soothed when she sobbed out her shame and despair after that dreadful afternoon when she had almost ended up sharing Carlo Saracini’s bed. ‘Of course I forgive you:
Simon and his family had moved next door when she was ten and he was fourteen. He had been the odd one out in his large, extrovert family. Quiet and unambitious, his greatest interest wildlife photography. Simon had been an oddity to his rugby-mad father and brothers. And Jessica had been a lonely child, painfully conscious from an early age that her mother had no time for her or her father.
Simon had heard Jessica sobbing her heart out in the summer house the day she came home early from school and saw Carole half-undressed with a strange man. Simon had climbed over the wall and she had been so shocked by what she had seen that she had told him. He had been very kind and comforting. He had put his arm round her and listened, showing her the easy affection she craved.
The adult world had come to her door that day. Simon had explained that she mustn’t tell her father or anyone else about that accidental glimpse. He had been naive too in his assumption that her mother didn’t make a habit of that sort of thing. Jessica hadn’t been very much older before she had learnt that there was always another man in Carole’s life and that her father simply tried to pretend not to know about those men.
Indeed she had soon realised that her mother’s frequent affairs were food for the juiciest gossip in town. That knowledge had been an agonising humiliation to live with during the sensitive teen years.
And throughout it all, Simon had been there for her. Her best friend, her adolescent hero. By the time she had reached seventeen, both their families had begun to view them as inseparable. But, looking back, she now recalled that Simon had never talked of love or marriage or children with her, not until his family and other people began teasing them repeatedly about when they planned to tie the knot.
He had actually gone down to work in London for over a year, coming back on only odd weekends, and she had thought she was losing him, had actually wondered if Simon had ever been hers to lose, if indeed he was striving to break away from the popular belief that they were childhood sweethearts destined to marry.
Then out of the blue, the Christmas she was eighteen, Simon had asked her to get engaged. Even when he’d carefully stressed his wish for a long engagement, Jessica had been ecstatic, convinced that together they were a match made in heaven. There was nothing she could not tell Simon, nothing, it seemed, that they could not discuss. In every way they had seemed to complement each other, unlike her parents who didn’t have a single thought in common.
Dear God, but she had been so innocent, she reflected now, tucking the photo into her overnight bag. Blind right to the bitter end. When had it finally occurred to her that the average male would have lifted the roof when his bride-to-be very nearly fell into another man’s bed a week before the wedding? Her betrayal should have mattered to Simon. It should have been important to him. And forgiveness should not have come so quickly and easily to his lips. Ironically, Jessica had been far more upset than Simon had been. She had wanted to cancel the wedding but Simon had pleaded with her, telling her how much he needed her, and in the end, she had allowed herself to be persuaded...
The limousine ate up the miles back to the hotel and with every mile her tension mounted another unbearable notch. Not only was she being forced to face a savage humiliation, but also to accept the necessity of bargaining with Carlo for her father’s sake. She did not yet know if Carlo would even agree to what she had already promised in his name.
Jessica didn’t approach the night receptionist. With the chauffeur bringing up the rear with her bag and waving away the proffered attentions of the porter, she was terrified of being asked where she was going and why she wasn’t signing the hotel register. The man flicked her a glance, said nothing, and then her pale cheeks fired on a worse thought. Did he think she was a call-girl? Didn’t hotels discreetly ignore those sort of comings and goings?
A waiter opened the door of Carlo’s suite.
Carlo was standing by the fireplace, talking on the phone in rapid Italian. He looked past Jessica and made a signal to his chauffeur, briefly connected with Jessica’s taut stance several steps inside the room and said carelessly in an aside, ‘I was about to dine without you, cara:
Her gaze fell on the table exquisitely set for two. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast but she did not feel hungry. The waiter lit the candelabra, dimmed the lights and then uncorked the wine and hovered.
Carlo cast the phone aside and crossed the room in a couple of long strides. Confident hands undid the sash at her waist, parted her coat and slid it off her tense shoulders as if she were a doll to be undressed.
‘Pour the wine and leave us,’ he murmured to the waiter, a hand touching her narrow back as he walked her to the table, tugged out a chair and sat her down.
With a not quite steady hand she reached for her glass as soon as it was filled.
‘One glass only,’ Carlo decreed with dark satire. ‘I would hate to be accused of getting you drunk a second time.’
Heat crawled up her slender throat. She couldn’t meet his eyes. She couldn’t think of anything beyond the fact that she was here in Carlo’s suite and expected to share his bed tonight. ‘I think the receptionist thought I was a call-girl.’
‘Surely not?’ Carlo parried silkily. ‘A high-class hooker would never be so badly dressed.’
Her teeth clenched. ‘I didn’t come here to be insulted.’
‘I think you came here to take whatever I choose to hand out,’ Carlo flicked back, skimming her taupe skirt and blouse with a curled lip. ‘When you kept me waiting, I mistakenly assumed you were dressing up for the occasion—’
A choked laugh that was no laugh at all escaped her. ‘What occasion?’
‘I ordered all your favourite foods.’
So he had. She hadn’t noticed. He had to have a phenomenal memory.
‘I remember everything about you:
He sounded as if he expected a round of applause.
‘We have to talk about my father,’ she opened in a rush.
‘You haven’t met my eyes once since you entered this room.’
Involuntarily, she clashed with glittering gold alive with impatience above a set jawline. Evidently she was not delivering the required responses.
‘This won’t work if you can’t do better than this,’ he said drily, unfeelingly.
‘Don’t threaten me...’ she warned tautly, great violet eyes nailed to his hard dark features. ‘I function even less efficiently under threat. Now ... can we talk about my father?’
‘I prefer to eat to the accompaniment of light conversation.’
Her gaze damned him to hell and back. She dug into the pâté with sudden appetite. She worked through the next two courses without speaking unless forced. If anyone lost their appetite it was Carlo, finally thrusting his plate away with an imprecation and tossing aside his napkin as he rose from the table.
‘You sulk like a little girl.’
‘I am not sulking. Carlo.’ Jessica embarked slowly on her dessert, it having long since occurred to her that the longer she spent eating, the longer she stayed out of the bedroom. ‘You wanted me here. I came. You wanted me to eat. I am eating.’
‘I won’t prosecute your father.’ The statement was coolly unemotional.
‘He can’t pay back the money—’
‘He must,’ Carlo’s tough jawline set hard. ‘The money must be returned:
‘How?‘ she demanded bitterly. ’He has no job and he’s not likely to get another one. And even if he sells everything he has, he will still owe you money.’
‘I will give him another position, then.’
Startled by that most unexpectedly generous offer, she stared at him. ‘Where?’
‘Not here. He needs a fresh start for this second chance. Leave it with me,’ he drawled. ‘I will find him something.’
‘And the money?’ she prompted.
‘He repays,’ Carlo repeated grimly. ‘If he is as sorry and as ashamed as you protest, he will want to repay it. He will not wish to be further in my debt.’
‘But—?’
‘In addition,’ Carlo cut across her interruption drily, ‘the offer of continuing employment will be conditional on his agreement to seek help for his addiction—’
‘He’s not addicted!’ Jessica jumped to her father’s defence.
‘Any man capable of gambling so far above his own income is an addict. He requires therapy to ensure he can withstand future temptation. Now, are you satisfied?’ he demanded shortly, dismissively, making her suspect that he had conceded more than he had planned to concede.
Yet Jessica had hoped for more. She had wanted the debt wiped out as she had promised Dr Guthrie. Whether it was unreasonable or not, she wanted every practical cause of stress removed from her father’s path. ‘You’re getting me pretty cheap, aren’t you?’ she said shakily and then, the instant she saw the dark fury leap into his set features, she wished she had bitten her tongue and stayed silent.
‘You want to go on the payroll for three months for sharing my bed?’ Carlo threw back at her with a flash of even white teeth. ‘A contract maybe, complete with severance pay and an assurance that you retain any jewellery or clothes that I buy you? OK, that is fine by me.’ He moved an expressive brown hand in a gesture that made it very clear that it was anything but fine with him. ‘I have heard of such contracts in America. But do tell me now up-front, what price do you put on that perfect body of yours?’
She wondered sickly whether, if someone handcuffed his talkative hands behind his back, he would still be able to articulate. ‘You know that’s not what I meant.’
‘Do I?’ Nostrils flaring, he surveyed her with derisive dark eyes.
She rested her brow down on the heel of one unsteady hand. It was almost one in the morning. That wouldn’t bother Carlo. He had reserves of energy unknown to less advantaged mortals. She wanted to go to bed but the prospect of bed was fraught with far more alarming possibilities than she could face. ‘At this moment,’ she whispered., ‘all I need to know is what you expect from me over the next three months.’
Silence fell. Since silence was rare from Carlo’s corner, she looked up.
Carlo cleared his throat, tension thrumming from his poised stance by the window. ‘I want you to pretend to be my fiancée—’
She couldn’t hide her astonishment. ‘Why?’
‘I have my reasons,’ he parried, the anger gone and replaced by a set gravity which disturbed her.
‘I don’t see why you can’t tell me—’
‘I will tell you only this,’ he breathed shortly, his golden eyes grim and distant as he studied her. ‘I have been estranged from my father for some years and now hie is dying. I wish to spend some time with him and, to facilitate this wish, I require a fiancee to accompany me to his home.’
Shaken by the unemotional explanation, Jessica studied him in turn, helplessly, maddeningly curious about why a pretend fiancee should be a necessary requirement of such a visit. She presumed he was intending a reconciliation with his father. Why muddy the water with the presence of a fake fiancee, for goodness’ sake? Especially when his father was dying ... a stranger would surely be even less welcome in those circumstances?
Her smooth brow furrowed. ‘Once you told me that you had no family.’
‘In the sense of the true meaning of the word “family”,’ he stressed, ‘that was the truth. My mother died when I was fourteen. I was sent off to school. My father remarried and after a while he chose to forget my existence. He had his life and I my own until, some years ago, we met again at his instigation...’ His strong features shadowed, his eyes night-dark and impassive. ‘And what happened between us then severed all familial ties,’ he completed harshly.
There were so many questions she wanted answered that she was on the edge of her seat. ‘What happened?’ she finally prompted in frustration when it was clear that he had no intention of continuing.
Carlo cast her a sardonic smile. ‘Like all women, you are incurably inquisitive. Knowledge is a weapon in a calculating woman’s hands. Do you think I don’t know that?’ he gibed, scanning her sudden pallor with derision. ‘I don’t spill my guts to anyone, cora... I never have and I never will.’
He made her feel like a peeping tom with a door slammed shut on her prying fingers. It hurt, humiliated.
‘I only require one thing from you. A good act. My father is not a stupid man. He will not be easily deceived.’
‘I don’t want to deceive anyone.’
‘That’s why we really will be lovers by the time we arrive. Intimacy, like sexual chemistry, is something that can be felt,’ Carlo asserted with husky conviction. ‘The sole deception will be the pretence of love and of course...my intention to marry you:
Lovers...She stiffened helplessly at the threat of what was yet to come. Arrive where? she might have asked, had not her nervous tension been too heightened for her to care at that moment. But still she longed to know why he was prepared to put on such an elaborate deception for his father’s benefit. And then cynicism suggested his motive. His father was dying, presumably a wealthy man. Was Saracini Senior attaching conditions to his heir’s inheritance? Was he demanding that Carlo settle down and marry? Could anyone be that old-fashioned these days? And was cold, hard cash at the foot of Carlo’s deception?
‘I think it’s time we went to bed.’
Jessica froze. Carlo reached down for her hands and drew her up slowly, almost tauntingly. ‘You’re trembling... why? You’ve been married for years; you are not without experience.’ Predictably, the reference to her marital status darkened his glittering eyes, hardened his mouth and roughened his syllables.
‘That doesn’t make any difference!’
‘Dio...’ he swore, running a familiar forefinger down the buttons lining her silk blouse and then pausing to flick up to the top one and slide it loose, allowing himself access to the shadowed valley between her breasts. ‘Of course it makes a difference. Were you a faithful wife?’
He towered over her. His broad shoulders blocked out the light. She felt trapped and cornered and told herself that that was why she could barely get air into her lungs. A blunt fingertip, very dark against her pale skin, hovered and she stopped breathing altogether. ‘Of c-course I was—’
‘Really? I find that hard to believe,’ Carlo murmured softly as his fingers hit on the next button.
‘Why?’ she gasped half an octave higher.
‘You weren’t faithful before the wedding ... why afterwards?’ he prompted. ‘If you had been my bride, I would have killed you. I certainly wouldn’t have gone ahead and still married you.’
I would have killed you. Said softly, conversationally but with incredible certainty. A buzzing sound filled her eardrums as a hand brushed across the swell of her breast. All of a sudden she felt light-headed and dizzy but her breasts felt full and heavy.
‘Did you tell him about what happened between us?’ Carlo asked.
‘Yes!’
‘So you told him the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I bet you didn’t,’ Carlo guessed with cruel and merciless amusement. ‘I doubt if you gave him a blow-by-blow account... he’d never have recovered from it.’
‘I don’t want to talk about this!’ Jessica slung at him tremulously and then, belatedly registering that her blouse was now hanging open, she backed away from him so fast, the side table behind her dug painfully into her hipbone. ‘Carlo... I met you again less than five hours ago—’
‘Who’s counting? I’m not. I would have been at this stage four and a half hours ago if you hadn’t been so stubborn—’
‘That’s disgusting!’ she threw back in raw outrage.
‘But truthful...don’t you know yet how the male mind works?’
She was starting to find out. Carlo was surveying her with smouldering golden eyes, hot with unhidden desire. And the sexual charge her mother had once mentioned was like fireworks in the heavy atmosphere. She edged round the table beneath that tracking, utterly ruthless gaze. ‘Carlo...please...not tonight... I mean—’ the tip of her pink tongue snaked out to moisten her lower lip ‘—I mean, you can’t really want to do this—’
‘I do.’ He bent down and shattered what remained of her fast-fleeing composure by letting his own tongue follow the path her own had taken along the full curve of her sultry lower lip, and heat surged between her thighs in a sensation long buried but never forgotten. She leapt back as though he had struck her and sent a lamp flying, her heart thumping like a jack-hammer against her breastbone.
He ignored the crash and caught her arm before she could busy herself reaching down for the broken pieces.