Nothing Changes Love

by Jacqueline Baird

  ‘Sit down and eat.’ He pulled out a chair for her as he did so.

  Lexi did as he instructed, taking the chair he offered. He had changed into a pair of dark pleated slacks and a crisp white shirt, and looked cool and somehow remote, which suited Lexi perfectly as she had no desire to speak to him; she was still seething from their last encounter. She sipped at her glass of wine and pushed the pasta around on her plate, making little attempt to eat it.

  ‘More wine?’ Jake’s cool voice broke the silence.

  ‘No, thank you.’

  His blue eyes narrowed for a second on her mutinous face. Then he topped up his glass and raising it to his mouth drained it, as much as to say she wasn’t worth talking to.

  Lexi shot him a look of loathing. Damn him! He was so controlled, so sure of his own diabolical power to make all obey him. Would nothing dent the overwhelming arrogance of the man? She took another sip of wine. ‘Tell me, Jake, how long is your sojourn in Italy likely to last? I seem to remember you were a workaholic, not at all the type to sit around smelling the roses.’

  Deliberately he forked some more pasta into his mouth and slowly chewed while his deep blue eyes, reflecting the lantern’s glow in their depths, raked over her face and the hint of cleavage revealed by the open neck of her dress and then back to her face.

  ‘A week, perhaps two.’ His dark lashes lowered seductively over his gleaming eyes. ‘Surely you’re not in so much of a hurry to return to England that you would begrudge me my first holiday in years.’ He smiled, a sinister twist of his lips, and added mockingly, ‘A second honeymoon, if you like.’

  ‘I don’t like,’ she spat back, and, lifting her glass to her mouth, drained the contents.

  ‘Oh, come on, Lexi, stop this nonsense.’ His voice had a sharp edge. ‘We’re both caught in the same trap. A savage passion we both hate but can’t deny. Why lie, Lexi?’ Jake demanded, an odd bitterness roughening his tone. ‘You’re my wife. We’re here together in one of the loveliest places on earth.’ He glanced around the floodlit gardens and the ocean beyond, his knowing gaze coming back to rest on Lexi. ‘Forget your silly resentment and enjoy yourself.’

  ‘Silly resentment?’ She almost choked on the words. ‘Is that what you call being blackmailed, having one’s job, one’s life taken over.’

  ‘I’m your husband,’ he said quietly with an edge of steel. ‘Blackmail apart. I have the right to keep you, and, as for your job, look on it as a learning process. Now you are eminently suitable to take care of my various homes and play hostess to the cosmopolitan collection of business acquaintances I am obliged to entertain occasionally. As my social secretary and mother of my children you will have more than enough to keep you occupied.’

  Various homes! And she just bet that included her old home. Social secretary? What a flaming nerve... ‘Won’t that be stepping on your so-faithful Lorraine’s toes?’ she queried derisively, hiding her pain at his mention of the word ‘mother’.

  ‘Jealous, Lexi?’

  ‘In your dreams,’ she jeered.

  ‘Lorraine is a brilliant businesswoman, but does not suffer fools gladly; she is far too outspoken for the social niceties, and a homemaker she is not...’ Jake’s eyes gleamed with latent amusement. ‘Whereas you are perfect for the role. Your upbringing as a diplomat’s daughter has taught you how to mix with anyone. Your gift for languages, your experience looking after the wealthy clientele at the Piccolo Paradiso, all conspire to make you the ideal wife for a man in my position.’

  ‘I wasn’t aware blackmailers needed a social secretary.’ She gazed at him with utter loathing. What he had said made a horrible kind of sense, and she believed him, but it hurt to finally hear the truth. Jake would carry on as he always had with the lovely Lorraine, while Lexi would be little more than a glorified housekeeper and mother of his children, wheeled out on social occasions as his polite, eminently suitable little wife.

  ‘Enough.’ Jake slapped his napkin on the table, and, reaching across, he grabbed her hand curving around the wine glass. ‘Stop these foolish recriminations, Lexi. Accept you are my wife.’

  ‘Do I have a choice?’ she asked dully.

  Jake regarded her with unwavering scrutiny, as if searching for something she had no knowledge of, then said with stark cynicism, ‘No.’

  ‘I didn’t think so.’ Bitterness laced her tone.

  ‘Let me do the thinking for both of us. Life will be a lot easier.’

  The touch of his long fingers, the intensity in his dark eyes stopped the scathing words she was about to utter. Instead, she could only gasp helplessly as he uncurled her fingers from the stem of the glass and raised her hand to his mouth, pressing a soft kiss into her palm before lacing her fingers with his own.

  ‘Tomorrow we start our holiday.’ Jake stood up, dragging her to her feet. He walked to the top of the table and she had to follow on her side. They met and his other hand grasped her shoulder. He stared down into the pale oval of her face, noting her defiant expression. ‘Forget the past.’

  ‘And enjoy a holiday?’ Lexi sneered. ‘I’m not that good an actress.’

  ‘It doesn’t make any difference. You don’t have to act in bed,’ Jake said tautly. ‘I can easily seduce you, and we both know it.’

  His confident assertion was true, and she hated him all the more for knowing it. ‘No...’ she muttered.

  ‘Yes...’ he asserted as his hand left her shoulder and gently touched her mouth, where the soft contours of her lips had swollen at the force of Jake’s kiss. She shivered at his touch.

  ‘I’m sorry if I hurt you earlier,’ Jake murmured with a faintly sardonic smile, as he noted her involuntary response.

  Lexi gasped as the soft pad of his thumb gently caressed her lip, sending tremors up and down her spine. She knew she should stop him, break away, but the deep husky voice, the romantic setting, all conspired against her common sense.

  ‘You have lovely lips; let me kiss it better,’ he murmured.

  His thumb teased her lips and tongue. She trembled and saw no point in denying him; she couldn’t. She was trapped as surely as Jake was by the physical desire that flared between them at the slightest glance. She hated it, and hated him, but she could not stop her body swaying towards him.

  ‘I’ve eaten, but I’m hungry again for you,’ Jake husked, and without further words he swept her up in his arms and carried her into the house...

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘FOR heaven’s sake, Lexi! Will you hurry up?’

  She heard Jake shouting right through the house and, with one last glance at her reflection in the dressing-table mirror, she patted her loosely pinned chignon and flinging her bag over her shoulder dashed out of her room. Today they were going to Pompeii, and by the sound of it Jake was in a hurry to get started. It was his fault she was late, she thought mutinously. Instead of Maria delivering her coffee to her room this morning, it had been Jake and before she could drink it he had climbed into bed with her. Her lips were still swollen from his kisses, and the rest of her body still glowed from his loving, though it galled her to have to admit it...

  She sighed as she walked down the stairs. Jake was an enigma; from the first night together in the villa when he had swept her up to bed and made passionate love to her and then got out of her bed and returned to his own, she had been trying to figure him out. But without much success. Though in all honesty she had nothing much to complain about. That was, if she discounted the fact that she had lost her job, and was being blackmailed, she told herself drily.

  When she had first known Jake she had been young and naïve. Now she congratulated herself that she was mature and sophisticated enough to meet him on his own terms. There was no point in denying the sexual chemistry between them, and she knew Jake was as much a hostage to the passion that flared between them as she was herself. The hatred they felt for each other only lent their passion an added edge, a dark desire, a battle of body and wills that turned the lovemaking into a fight for c
ontrol, and the bed into a battlefield with Jake always walking away victorious.

  Inwardly Lexi sighed. ‘Lovemaking’—that was a misnomer. Love didn’t enter into their relationship. A wry smile twisted her full lips as she reached the bottom of the stairs. Lust, yes, an indefinable animal attraction; whatever label she put on it didn’t really matter. At least she was mature enough to accept it as just that, without having to label it ‘love’. But sometimes, in the afterglow of passion, when Jake with almost indecent haste distanced himself from her, as though to touch her in anything other than passion disgusted him, she could not help feeling, deep down in the darkest reaches of her mind, his callous rejection, and grieving the loss of the tactile, loving man she had first married.

  ‘Lexi,’ she heard the roar, and ran the short distance through the hall and out of the front door.

  Jake was standing holding open the door of the lethal looking black Bugatti, a frown on his handsome face. Her heart lurched in her breast; he was wearing stylish Armani tailored shorts in a navy linen and a lighter blue polo shirt. The Mediterranean sun had darkened his skin to a deep, polished bronze, and he looked as lethal as the car.

  ‘At last, woman. Who was it told me we had to visit Pompeii in the morning, before the sun got too hot?’ he queried mockingly, then grinned wickedly.

  She knew what the grin was for. ‘And who was it delayed a poor girl in her bed while he had his evil way with her?’ she teased back easily.

  A slow, sexy smile lit his blue eyes. ‘Touché. Now get in the car.’

  It was like a day out of time. Jake relaxed completely from the cold, guarded man Lexi had become used to the past few days and became a typical tourist for the day. Lexi did not question the change. Her nerves were shot and she was glad of the respite from the constant tension that had fizzed like an unexploded bomb between them; the least spark and they were at each other’s throats. With a sigh of contentment she settled back in the passenger seat of the monster car and, straightening the short skirt of her simple blue sundress over knees, she determined to enjoy herself.

  Having parked the car in the area provided, Jake surprised her by taking her hand, and, laughing together at a middle-aged tourist buried under a mountain of cameras, hand in hand they made their way to the entrance of the ancient city. Hundreds of tourists spilled in an ever-increasing horde from the dozens of coaches arriving seemingly every minute, the jostling crowd and the multitude of different languages filling the hot morning air.

  A small, thick-set old Neapolitan man grabbed Jake’s arm. ‘Guide, sir? I, Luigi, am the best.’

  Jake glanced at the old man. ‘I don’t...’

  ‘Yes, let’s hire him,’ Lexi urged. ‘It is a huge place and I hate to admit it but, although I’ve been once before, I’m not that knowledgeable.’

  It was a brilliant decision; Luigi, with speed and a bit of deft manoeuvring, ushered Jake and Lexi through the crowd, the entrance fee paid, and up to the Porta Marina, the ancient gate that the public had to use to enter the city, in a matter of minutes.

  Jake’s hand squeezed Lexi’s, and she glanced questioningly up into his handsome face. ‘You were right, Luigi is worth the money solely for getting us to the front of the queue and in.’ He smiled.

  ‘Stop.’ Luigi’s upraised hand and the fact that he had planted himself directly in their path meant they could do no other but obey, and for the next few hours the little man managed to fill their heads with more facts about the ancient city than any guidebook could possibly accomplish.

  ‘First, I give you the background and then we proceed,’ Luigi told them authoritatively. ‘Pompeii was a settlement and first given its name in the eighth century BC. Built at the end of an ancient lava flow from what was considered the benign Mount Vesuvius, one hundred and thirty feet above sea-level at the mouth of the river Sarno, it was for centuries the trading place between the north and south Italian states, conquered by many and occupied by a few; it had a population of twenty-five thousand. Then Vesuvius, suddenly, on the twenty fourth of August, 79 AD, shortly after midday, violently erupted, blacking out the sun. Red-hot volcanic matter rained down on the hapless people, buildings crumbled and then, when the ash fell, all forms of life were extinguished. For centuries it was considered a place of evil and one thousand, six hundred years passed before excavations were begun and a further hundred and fifty years before it could be said the city was rediscovered.’

  ‘He can certainly talk,’ Jake murmured softly in Lexi’s ear, ‘but he knows his stuff.’ And, following the little man, they strode up the steep paved ramp that led to the gate’s two archways; the left hand arch had been designed for pedestrians and the other for horse-drawn carts, the ruts in the stone-paved road were deep and easily discernible, and the same gauge was still used on today’s railways, Luigi informed them proudly.

  ‘It’s incredible!’ Jake exclaimed, eyeing the streets and houses. ‘Two thousand years on and one can see exactly how people lived.’

  Lexi agreed and, walking beside him, watching the light in his eyes, the intensity with which he examined every aspect of the place, she was filled with a bittersweet memory. He had shown the same enthusiasm years ago when they had first wandered around Castle Howard.

  The Temple of Venus, the mighty open space of the Forum, they wandered through them all, and gazed in awe at the remains of the Basilica dating back to pre-Roman times. The triumphal arches of the temple of Jupiter, and the Temple of Apollo caused Jake to comment, ‘They certainly hedged their bets where their gods were concerned.’

  ‘But it did no good,’ Luigi piped up. ‘Nature is all-powerful, always has been and always will be.’

  ‘I think we have a homespun philosopher for a guide.’ Jake bent his dark head and whispered in Lexi’s ear, she glanced up at him, a smile curving her full lips.

  ‘I think you may be right,’ she murmured as Luigi led them into the Forum Baths.

  ‘See: hot and cold baths; central heating; drainage; everything you would find in a modern city today. They had everything we have today. Nothing changes,’ Luigi declared, and as they walked on he pointed out what had once been a dress shop, and two doors down a barber’s shop.

  Grinning at Jake, Luigi said, ‘Then as now, the lady went to the boutique, and the man visited the barber and waited to pick up his lady and pay the bill. Nothing changes.’ Jake and Luigi chuckled in masculine bonding, while Lexi gritted her teeth and grinned, thinking, Male chauvinists.

  Further on they stared in awe at the brilliantly coloured wall-paintings in the Villa of the Mysteries. Outside again, they gazed sombrely through iron bars into a warehouse where dozens of common household items, bowls and jugs and figures, an arm, a torso lay, all coated in the pale grey stone.

  In a glass case lay the body of a young woman, obviously pregnant, petrified in stone for all eternity. Lexi shivered and, freeing her hand from Jake’s, walked away. She looked around at the high walls, the scrolled pillars, the streets and houses, her eyes misting with tears.

  She felt an arm curve around her shoulder, strong fingers kneading the soft flesh. ‘Are you OK, Lexi? The heat getting to you?’ Jake’s deep voice asked quietly. She glanced up through thick lashes, and noted the concern in his dark eyes.

  ‘Yes, no. I don’t know,’ she murmured.

  ‘Reminded you, did it? The pregnant woman.’

  Her eyes widened. Could this be Jake, the ruthless entrepreneur? Since when had he become so sensitive? ‘Yes, a little perhaps. I miscarried, but that woman lost everything, and it suddenly struck me, even with all these people around—’ she gestured with a wave of her hand at the dozens of tourists as they strolled along ‘—there is something about this place, an aura of sadness, doom.’ She unconsciously shook her head to dispel the feeling of melancholy.

  ‘I wasn’t much help when you lost the baby, was I, Lexi?’

  His words stopped her in her tracks, and she could think of nothing to say. The pressure of his hand on her
shoulder turned her around to face him. With his free hand he lifted her chin. ‘I’m truly sorry, Lexi. I let you down, the very moment you needed me most.’

  The sincerity in his tone, the deep regret in his indigo eyes convinced Lexi he was telling the truth as he saw it. ‘Oh. I wouldn’t say that.’ She lowered her lashes, suddenly confused by Jake’s confession. ‘I was depressed, not really aware of anything very much.’ If she had been more alert to her surroundings she might have realised sooner that he was having an affair with Lorraine, the thought hit her. And, shrugging his hand off her shoulder, she added, ‘I’m sure you did your best,’ and moved on.

  ‘No, damn it!’ Jake caught her arm. ‘No, I didn’t. I was so caught up in my business troubles, I didn’t give you as much attention as you deserved.’

  Lexi glanced up at him. Business troubles. Looking back, she realised he had hinted as much at the time, but she had been too wrapped in her own grief to take much notice. Was he telling the truth? She studied his handsome face; his expression was stern but serious, and she was stunned by the depths of emotion she glimpsed fleetingly in his dark eyes.

  ‘I couldn’t talk about the loss of our son, it was too painful. But I want you to know, Lexi. Whatever our differences, when and if we have another child, I will be there for you every step of the way.’

  A lump formed in her throat and she blinked hard to vanquish the threatening tears. ‘Thank you for that,’ she said softly. She believed him, all of it. So where did that leave her? she wondered. Could it be that Jake had turned to Lorraine simply for sex, when she herself had lost interest in it? It would explain why he hadn’t married Lorraine. But did it make his betrayal any less if that was the case? She didn’t know...and, catching the side of Jake’s shirt, she added, ‘Come on. Poor Luigi is going to lose us if we don’t hurry up.’ She urged him forward.

  ‘You OK?’ Jake asked, slipping his arm around her shoulder, a rather wry smile twitching the corners of his hard mouth at her blunt changing of the subject.