Mistresses: Blackmailed With Diamonds / Shackled With Rubies

by Lucy Gordon;Sarah Morgan;Robyn Donald;Lucy Monroe;Lee Wilkinson;Kate Walker

  ‘I really would prefer not to be alone with Vincenzo at the cottage.’

  She hadn’t anticipated how he might interpret that remark and was stunned when immediately all trace of annoyance and bad temper evaporated from David’s face to be replaced by an indulgent smile.

  ‘I understand now. You’re thinking of a romantic weekend—just the two of us—’

  ‘No…’

  It was a squawk of protest. One that David ignored completely.

  ‘Come here…’

  Amy froze in shock and disbelief as he grabbed at her, hauling her into his arms without a care for her rigid stiffening away from him. His mouth crushed hers, hot and wet, and totally unwanted.

  How could David ever have thought she wanted a romantic weekend alone with him? And she certainly hadn’t given him the encouragement he seemed to assume now as he lifted a hand to cup the curve of her breast, making her jump in shock like a frightened, disturbed cat.

  ‘David!’ she protested sharply, grateful for the fact that he stilled at once in response to her sharp protest.

  ‘What? Am I taking things a bit too fast?’ He seemed totally unabashed by her obvious consternation. ‘But I thought…’

  ‘Well, you thought wrong…’ Amy muttered, then hastily rethought. Whatever else he was, David was still her boss. ‘I think we’ve got our wires crossed,’ she amended awkwardly. ‘Probably my fault…I’m really not feeling too brilliant tonight. I—haven’t been sleeping too well lately…’

  Understatement of the century! She hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep ever since Vincenzo had moved in. It had been impossible to relax knowing that he was only a few feet away, across the landing, that every movement she made, every creak of the bed might carry to where he lay, revealing just how restless her nights were.

  ‘I think I need an early night—try to get some rest.’

  To her relief he didn’t argue.

  ‘You do that then. I’ll ring you tomorrow to see how you are.’

  Giving her cheek a pat that was nothing short of paternal, he left. Amy watched him walk briskly down the garden path before she let the door swing shut and leaned back weakly against it, closing her eyes in a gesture of exhausted relief.

  ‘So you’re still not sleeping well.’

  The drawling, softly accented voice broke into her reverie, snapping her head up sharply, a groan escaping her involuntarily. Of course she was not alone. She hadn’t been alone for weeks now.

  ‘Insomnia can be very distressing…’

  Vincenzo straightened up from where he had been lounging against the wall at the end of the small hallway.

  ‘I can offer you a cure for that.’

  ‘I’m sure you can!’ Amy flashed, glaring up at this intruder into her life—a dark, sleek cuckoo that had invaded her comfortable little nest and was set on destroying it totally. ‘And I can just imagine exactly what is going through that filthy cesspool of a mind of yours. Well, for your information, the answer is no. No, I will not sleep with you; no, you cannot—’

  ‘I suggest you wait until you’re invited,’ Vincenzo inserted silkily, wrong-footing her completely. ‘I don’t recall saying anything about taking you to bed. What I had in mind was a drink my Nonna always made me if I couldn’t sleep. It’s a combination of—’

  ‘I’m sorry!’

  Conscience forced her to say it; forced her to face the fact that, this time at least, she had misjudged him.

  To her consternation, weak tears were pricking at her eyes and she dashed them away angrily with the back of her hand. They were the last thing she needed now. But his unexpected concern had been positively the last straw, knocking down defences that were already dangerously impaired.

  ‘I didn’t think…’

  ‘Credit me with some standards,’ Vincenzo’s tone was icy. ‘I promised I would wait. That I would watch you with this David and see if he could offer you happiness. I intend to keep to my word.’

  ‘Thank you…’

  It was just a whisper, a thin thread of sound that he must have had to strain to hear, but she was incapable of anything more. The truth was that she didn’t know whether she wanted him to keep to his word or not.

  ‘But that doesn’t mean that I am not tempted.’

  His voice changed dramatically on the last phrase, thickening, becoming raw and harsh with an unexpected emotion.

  ‘That I don’t want to take you in my arms and kiss you senseless, drive that “darling” you called him right back down your lying throat, erase the touch of his kisses from your lips and replace them with my own until all you can feel, all you can taste is me.’

  ‘Vincenzo…’

  She had never seen him like this before. Never seen that blaze of passion in his eyes, heard the fervour that roughened his usually smooth tones.

  ‘So tell me,’ he swept on, ignoring her stumbling interjection. ‘Tell me what it was like for you. How does your cold-blooded Englishman kiss you? Does he take your mouth with a hunger that makes your senses swim? Does his passion burn you right to your soul? Tell me!’ he ordered, when she could only stare at him in blank confusion.

  ‘It’s—’ She had no idea what to say. ‘It’s—it’s nice…’ she lied desperately.

  ‘Nice!’

  He made the word sound like an expletive.

  ‘Nice! Per Dio, how dare you? How dare you even think of turning from my arms and into his? How dare you exchange what we had for this insipid apology for a relationship?’

  ‘I…’ Amy tried again but with no more success.

  ‘Do you know how it feels? How it has been these past weeks? Well, I’ll tell you. I have to stand and watch him kiss you—paw at you…’

  His hands flew up in a violent expression of all the things he couldn’t find the words to say, even his fluent English deserting him in the force of his emotions.

  But then his mood changed again with bewildering speed, leaving her feeling as if her head was spinning as he held out his hand, long fingers beckoning to her.

  ‘Come to me,’ he commanded, low and gentle, huskily enticing, impossible to resist. ‘Come to me and let me show you what a kiss could be like, how a woman should be held, how a lover should touch…Come to me, innamorata, and I will teach you what it means to be made love to…’

  In her mind, Amy knew that refusal was the only safe option; that she should turn and run, escape while she could. But her mind wasn’t strong enough to resist the tug of other, far more primitive temptations, hold out against the sensual spell of his words and his eyes and all they promised.

  Vincenzo’s arms had closed around her before she was fully aware that she had moved, holding her softly yet so firmly that she knew she could never break away.

  And the truth was that she didn’t want to. This felt so good. It was frightening how right it felt to be there, how safe. It was as if to be here, in his arms, to be held like this was what she had been born for. And yet reality was that ‘safe’ was the exact opposite of what she should be thinking. Emotionally, she had never been in greater danger in her life.

  But then his dark head lowered and his lips took hers and instantly thinking became a total impossibility.

  What stunned her was his gentleness. The delicacy she hadn’t anticipated, the tenderness that made her mouth part on a sigh of sheer delight. But of course, Vincenzo knew what he was doing.

  If he had been forceful and demanding, if the hunger that had blazed in his words, his eyes, had been there in his kiss, then she would have panicked and resisted, fighting hard to be free. But this was a slow, delicious seduction of the senses, a delicate enticement that gently teased and awakened each tiny nerve, making her head swim and every inch of her skin flood with heat.

  ‘Vincenzo…’

  The syllables of his name were a soft, swooning sound against his lips, the only response she was capable of forming. She was adrift on a golden sea of sensation, floating luxuriously. The sounds of the cars in the street
outside, all awareness of her surrounding blurred into a burning haze. All she knew was Vincenzo and the deep, yearning need he woke inside her. Her breasts stung with sensitivity and there was a heated ache between her legs, making her crush herself closer, hard up against the potent evidence of his forceful arousal.

  ‘Can your Englishman do this?’ Vincenzo murmured against her mouth. ‘Can he kiss you this way, make you feel this need, this passion? Does David tell you how beautiful you are, how…Amy?’ His voice changed as he felt her involuntary reaction. ‘Amy, what is it?’

  He should never have spoken: the sound of the words was like a blow to her head, shattering the protective bubble that enclosed her, sealing her off from reality.

  ‘No!’ It was a moan of pain, of loss and bitter disillusionment. ‘No!’

  With a movement that wrenched at her heart as well as her body, she twisted her head away from his kisses, thankful that the movement also kept her from having to see his face. She didn’t dare to look into those burning onyx eyes, fearful of what she might read there. His physical reaction was bad enough, the sudden total stillness terrifying, the instant withdrawal that she could sense through the way he held her making her shiver in apprehension.

  ‘No. Stop! I won’t let you do this!’

  ‘Won’t let me?’ Vincenzo echoed on a dangerous note. ‘Amy, carissima, you cannot say that. This is what we were made for, you and I. To deny it is to deny yourself—your heart—your soul.’

  It came too close to her own thoughts of just seconds before, throwing her into a panic so that she snatched at the first thing that came into her mind to use as a shield against him.

  ‘But David…’

  The use of the other man’s name was like a sword coming down between them, driving them apart. With a harsh, violent curse, Vincenzo let her go, releasing her so rapidly that she fell back against the wall, her hands going out to support her.

  ‘David! David is nothing! He’s all wrong for you.’

  ‘No, he’s not!’ Amy bluffed wretchedly, praying he wouldn’t see through her smokescreen, realise she was protesting far, far too much. ‘He’s what I need. He’s calm, he’s organised, he…’

  The cynical lifting of one dark eyebrow almost destroyed her, bringing her up sharp against the way that she wasn’t even sounding convincing.

  ‘He brings me flowers.’

  Her wild gesture directed that cold-eyed gaze to the vase of flowers she had been arranging earlier. Vincenzo spared the glorious display a single, scathing glance.

  ‘He brings you roses,’ he drawled sardonically. ‘When anyone who knows you knows that they are far from your favourite flower. A lover would bring you freesias.’

  ‘He tries,’ Amy whispered struggling not to remember a time in Venice when she had opened the door to her hotel room to find the air filled with the heady perfume of vase after vase of her absolute favourite flower arranged to cover every available surface. ‘He wants me to be happy.’

  ‘Trying and wanting are not enough.’

  ‘And neither are passion and physical desire! Passion burns, Vincenzo, it hurts…it destroys. Without love, it’s like a forest fire raging out of control, or a tornado that sweeps aside everything in its path. And when it burns itself out, as it inevitably must…’

  ‘You would still be my wife.’

  ‘In a marriage that was a lie from start to finish.’

  ‘I vowed to love…’

  ‘Oh, don’t bring that word into it!’

  Amy’s hands came up before her, as if to protect herself from the impact of the word she knew he didn’t mean.

  ‘Just because you took a vow, it doesn’t mean you know how to love!’

  ‘And David does? He is truly what you choose?’

  For a long, silent moment the question seemed to hang in the air between them like a physical barrier, impossible to brush aside.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Amy acknowledged at last, expelling the words on a sigh of resignation. ‘I only know that I don’t choose you.’

  Please don’t let him fight me on this! she prayed as the words died away. Don’t make me have to say it again, because I really don’t think I could manage it.

  Through dull, clouded eyes, she watched Vincenzo’s proud head go back, his anger fade to a cold, bitter derision that seared over her exposed nerves in scathing contempt.

  ‘I said you were a coward,’ he drawled at last, ‘but I had no idea just how craven you were. You talk of passion but you don’t know what the word means.’

  Slowly, he shook his head, as if in disbelief at her foolishness, then an arrogant flick of his hand seemed to dismiss her totally from his thoughts.

  ‘Go to your David, Amy, bella mia,’ he flung at her, the contempt in his tone eating into her soul like acid. ‘Go to him and live your emotional half-life; it’s what you deserve. He’s what you deserve. But if sometimes at night the hunger comes over you—if you lie awake and think of how it might have been, then remember what you could have had, but you were too faint-hearted to take it. And perhaps, when that moment comes, you’ll recognise the mistake you made and wish it could be otherwise—but by then it will be far, far too late.’

  Pivoting on his heel, he turned and strode away from her without a backward glance. And Amy could only watch him go.

  Just for one brief moment, the impulse to call him back almost overwhelmed her. She even opened her mouth to try, but hastily closed it again, recognising the danger she was in.

  He was right, she acknowledged, sinking back against the wall, overwhelmed by a terrible desolation. In the future she would look back and remember, and regret what might have been.

  But the problem was that her ‘what might have been’ and the one Vincenzo was thinking of were not the same. They were at totally opposite ends of the emotional spectrum, and that was the real reason why she had been forced to make the choice she had. A choice that hadn’t been a choice at all, but purely a matter of survival.

  Chapter Twelve

  AS THE car drew to a halt outside the small, white-painted cottage, Amy found it impossible not to reflect on just how different this arrival was from the one that she had been anticipating. And not just because she wasn’t here on her own as she’d expected.

  ‘Why the big sigh?’ the man at her side asked. ‘Are you wishing David was here with you?’

  ‘We both know that was impossible,’ she returned tartly, well aware of the fact that she was dodging the issue. ‘He had to stay behind to sort out that business deal.’

  ‘Otherwise he would be here, and I’d be the one back in Charnham,’ Vincenzo drawled. ‘Which is no doubt exactly where you wish I was right now.’

  With an effort Amy produced a shrug that she prayed expressed total indifference to his statement.

  ‘The cottage has two perfectly adequate bedrooms. You’re welcome to the use of one of them. After all, we’ve managed—what is it?—over a month now of li—’

  Nervously she danced away from the emotive term ‘living together’.

  ‘Of sharing accommodation in my flat. This can hardly be much more of a problem.’

  Except that this cottage was even smaller than she had expected, probably taking up less space than her home. They would practically be living on top of one another and, after the stresses and strains of the past weeks, that was not a prospect she anticipated with any degree of relish.

  She hadn’t realised that they were going to be quite so far from civilisation, either. The postal address of the cottage might have been Grasmere, but they had driven through the village over half an hour ago, finally finding their destination at the end of a long, winding track, a mile or more from anything that could be called a road.

  This must be why it had been advertised as a honeymoon cottage. It would be perfect for anyone who wanted peace and quiet and just each other’s company. But the cruel irony of this trip was that it was to discuss the break-up of a marriage, not the start of one,

 
She still hadn’t fully come to terms with the way that she had been manoeuvred into taking Vincenzo with her. She had just about decided to abandon the idea of the weekend in the Lake District, giving it up as a bad job. But then Vincenzo had started manipulating the situation.

  ‘If you want this divorce, then there are things we need to discuss,’ he’d told her. ‘This weekend cottage you’ve booked seems like the perfect place to do that.’

  ‘We can talk about them here!’ Amy had protested, the thought of being here alone with Vincenzo tightening every muscle in rejection.

  ‘Not without David dropping in and interfering every minute,’ Vincenzo pointed out. ‘If you’re not at work with him, then he’s here. We don’t need any interruptions.’

  Which was something she couldn’t deny, Amy admitted privately. David just didn’t seem to get the message that his attentions weren’t welcomed. He’d stunned her completely by turning up with an unexpected and, for David, a surprisingly carefully chosen birthday present of her favourite perfume and a beautiful silk scarf, and no amount of hinting could stop him from almost taking up residence in her flat. In the end she had given up trying to be gentle, and had told him straight that there could never be any relationship between them.

  But not before David had even tried to interfere in her arrangements for her weekend away, something that Vincenzo had coolly exploited to his own advantage when he had discussed the holiday in front of her boss. Knowing only too well that David, with his determination to please this most valuable customer, would support him, he had once more spun the story of wanting to see the Lake District until David took up his cause.

  ‘Don’t be a silly girl…’

  David covered her hand with his, setting her teeth on edge.

  ‘You go ahead and enjoy the break. You deserve it. Leave me to sort out this Ravenhead deal and you show Vincenzo some of the beauties of our countryside.’