by Lynne Graham
They drove straight to the airport.
‘Did you mind that your parents weren’t part of the ceremony?’ Vitale asked her as soon as they were alone.
‘Not at all. It wouldn’t have been fancy enough for my mother and somehow my father would have found a way of ruining the day by calling me stupid.’ Her soft mouth compressed and she shrugged a forlorn shoulder, conscious of his bewildered appraisal and saying nothing more.
‘Why would he have done that?’
‘I should have told you by now—I suffer from dyslexia. Badly,’ Zara stressed, her hands tightly curled together on her lap because it took courage to confess a weakness that had been regarded with such disgust by her family. ‘Regardless of what my father thinks, though, I’m not slow-witted. I have some difficulty reading, writing and spelling but I manage most things fine with the help of a computer.’
Vitale frowned because he was recalling her blank appraisal of the instructions on the pregnancy test and suddenly he was rethinking that scene with a tight feeling inside his chest. The anxiety, the fear of rejection, in her gaze screamed at him. He realised that, regardless of her attempt to refer casually to the condition, what she had just admitted was a very big deal for her. ‘I went to school with a couple of dyslexics. I know you’re not slow-witted and fortunately dyslexics can get a lot of help these days.’
Zara grimaced. ‘My father doesn’t believe dyslexia exists. He just thinks I’m stupid and he wouldn’t allow me to have speech-language therapy.’
‘That’s ridiculous. Didn’t you get help at school?’
‘I was sixteen before I was diagnosed and I left a few months later. Although I dropped out of my A-level studies, I do manage,’ she said again, clearly keen to drop the subject.
He remembered how pale and tense she had been while she struggled with those instructions, clearly terrified of him realising that she had a problem, and his rage with Monty Blake roared up through him like volcanic lava. Instead of being taught how to cope with the disorder, she had been taught to be ashamed of it and left to struggle alone. He wondered why that image bothered him, why he should feel so angry on her behalf. When had he ever felt protective about a woman? Only once before and even then his intelligence warning him to keep his distance had warred with more natural instincts.
‘It’s never too late to learn. Some sessions with a professional would help you handle the condition now,’ Vitale remarked evenly. ‘And lift your confidence.’
Zara went pink. She bit back the tart comment that she was sure he hadn’t expected to take a wife still in need of lessons, because she was well aware that when she put herself down she was revealing low self-esteem. Furthermore she recognised that he had seen shrewdly right to the heart of her problem. Her family’s attitude to her dyslexia had imposed secrecy on her and her subsequent fear of exposure had only made the problem worse.
‘I thought you’d be embarrassed that I’m a dyslexic.’
‘It would take a great deal more to embarrass me, gioia mia. Your parents overreacted. Albert Einstein and some very famous people were also dyslexic,’ Vitale fielded casually.
They boarded a private jet and as Zara settled into a cream leather seat in the cabin she was thinking once again about how very little she knew about the man she had married. ‘I had no idea that you owned your own plane,’ she confided.
‘I travel a lot. It speeds up my schedule and ensures that I can move quickly in a crisis—’
‘Where are we heading?’ she prompted.
‘It’s a surprise, hopefully one which will please you.’
Lunch was served. After several sleepless nights spent worrying about the unknowns in her future, Zara was too exhausted to do more than pick at the food on her plate. Finally she pushed the plate away and closed her heavy eyes to rest them. That was the last thing she registered until the jet landed and Vitale shook her shoulder to rouse her from a deep sleep.
She was torn between pain and pleasure while he drove her through the Tuscan hills, for although she loved the Italian landscape she could not forget how much he had hurt her on her last visit.
‘Isn’t this the road we took to the Palazzo Barigo?’ she pressed at one point.
‘Sì.’ His classic profile was taut, his response clipped.
When the car actually turned beneath the arched entrance to the palazzo, Zara turned with a frown to exclaim, ‘What are we doing here?’
‘You’ll see.’ Vitale parked at the front of the palazzo and, filled with curiosity, Zara scrambled out. Was he planning to introduce her to his uncle? Smoothing her dress down while wishing he had given her some warning of his intentions, she mounted the shallow flight of steps to the front door, which was already opening. She came to a sudden halt when she saw the domestic staff assembled in the marble hall, clearly waiting to greet them.
Joining her, Vitale curved a hand to her elbow and introductions were made. There was no sign of any member of the family and she was confused when a middle-aged manservant called Edmondo showed them into a spacious reception room where once again she expected to meet Vitale’s relatives, only nobody awaited them there either.
‘What on earth are we doing here?’ she demanded of Vitale in a perplexed whisper. ‘Is this where we’re going to stay?’
‘I own the palazzo,’ Vitale told her flatly, breaking the news with the minimum possible fanfare.
CHAPTER NINE
VITALE’S blunt confession hit Zara like a brick thrown at a glass window, shattering her composure. She recalled the tour of the gardens that he had said he had arranged. She remembered the gardener waving at him that same day and she turned pale before a flush of mortified pink mantled her cheekbones.
‘Oh, my goodness, what an idiot I am!’ she gasped, her temper rising hot and fast because she felt exceedingly foolish. ‘But you told me this place belonged to your uncle—’
‘No, I didn’t. I only told you that I was staying here with my uncle and his family when your aunt worked on the garden—’
‘Semantics—you lied!’ Zara shot the furious accusation back at him. ‘You’re so tricky I’ll never be able to trust a word you say!’
Vitale stood very still, reining back the aggression that her condemnation threatened to unleash. ‘I bought the palazzo two years ago when my uncle decided to sell up but, while I have instigated repairs and maintained the property, I have not attempted to make personal use of the house until now,’ he admitted without any expression at all.
He watched her, the daylight flooding through the tall windows burnishing her eye-catching hair and illuminating the fine lacework on her dress while enhancing the slender, striking elegance of her figure. He wondered when her pregnancy would start showing and experienced a glimmer of excitement at the prospect that shook him. But the awareness that her body would soon swell with visible proof of his baby turned him on hard and fast, no matter how fiercely he fought to repress the primitive reaction. Once again in her presence he was at the mercy of feelings and thoughts that were foreign to him and he hated it, craving the cool distance and self-discipline that were more familiar to him.
Zara settled furious lavender eyes on her bridegroom. ‘Why not? If you bought the palazzo why haven’t you used it?’
‘I didn’t feel comfortable here. When I was a teenager I stayed in this house during my term breaks and I have no good memories of those visits,’ he admitted with a hard twist of his eloquent mouth.
‘So what are we doing here?’ Zara demanded baldly, still all at sea.
‘You love the garden—I assumed that you might also like the house. It is a fine one.’
Zara was more confused than ever. An ancestral home was right off the grid of her scale of experience. To talk of it in terms of liking or disliking seemed positively cheeky. Yes, she had friends who inhabited such properties and she had occasionally stayed in them for the weekend but it had never occurred to her that she might one day actually live in one. ‘Why did you buy a pla
ce this size if you don’t even like it?’
‘The palazzo has belonged to the Barigo family for centuries. I felt it was my duty to buy it and conserve it for the next generation.’
‘But your name isn’t Barigo …’ Zara was still hopelessly at a loss.
‘I have chosen not to claim the name but I am a Barigo.’
The penny of comprehension dropped noisily in Zara’s head and she was embarrassed that it had taken her so long to make that leap in understanding. That was why he and his sister had had different surnames. They must have had different fathers. Evidently he was an illegitimate Barigo, born outside marriage and never properly acknowledged by the rest of the family. Yet he seemed so very much at ease against the grandeur of the great house, she mused. He had the education, the sophistication, the inborn classy assurance to look at home against such a splendid backdrop. He also had a level of worldly success and wealth that the most recent of the palazzo’s owners had evidently lacked. Yet in spite of all that, deep down inside himself, Vitale had still not felt good enough to stay in the palazzo he owned and relax there and that disturbing truth twisted inside Zara’s heart like a knifepoint turning.
‘If you buy a house, you should use it,’ Zara told him squarely. ‘You seem to have a lot of staff employed here and you maintain it. My aunt used to say that a house that isn’t lived in loses its heart.’
‘I’m not sure that the Palazzo Barigo ever had a heart,’ Vitale contended wryly. ‘My sister grew up here. It was different for her. This was her home until her father died and my uncle inherited.’
‘Why didn’t your sister inherit?’
‘The palazzo only goes to the men in the family. Loredana got the money instead,’ he explained.
‘So, why did you have to buy it to get it?’ Zara pressed curiously. ‘Because you’re illegitimate?’
‘I’m not illegitimate … it’s too complicated to get into now,’ Vitale countered with a dismissive shrug of a broad shoulder.
He didn’t want to talk about his background and the shutters came back down. He was shutting her out because he didn’t want to tell her any more. But these surroundings, his evidently troubled early life and what had happened to him since then were the key to Vitale’s complex personality. Just then she recalled the strange scarring on his back and wondered once again what had caused it. At the same time, Zara was mystified by the depth of her longing to understand what drove Vitale Roccanti. Once she had thought he was a cold, callous guy focused purely on revenge, but the tiny seed of life inside her womb had steamrollered over that conviction and triumphed. As had her own personal safety, she conceded, recalling how he had brought her father to her door.
‘Let’s take a look at the house,’ she responded lightly, eager to distract him from the bad memories that he had mentioned.
‘You’re hardly dressed for a grand tour—’
‘I can change.’
‘I was rather looking forward to taking that dress off for you, cara mia,’ Vitale admitted with a charismatic smile playing attractively at the corners of his beautifully shaped mouth.
‘Well, you’re going to have to help me get out of it. Getting into it was a two-person job,’ Zara confided, thinking of the complex lacing that ran down her spine. ‘I would never have managed without Bee’s help this morning.’
As they reached the imposing marble staircase Edmondo appeared to show them the way and set off ahead of them at a stately pace that very nearly gave Zara a bout of irreverent giggles. Her dancing eyes meeting Vitale’s in shared amusement, she had to swallow hard. The massive bedroom Edmondo displayed for their benefit was full of such extravagantly gilded furniture, embroidered, tasselled and fringed drapes and grandeur that Zara thought it would have been better suited to a reigning monarch. But there was no mistake because their luggage awaited them beside a pair of monumentally vast mirrored wardrobes.
‘Wow …’ she framed in a fading voice once they were alone again, unable to even imagine sleeping in that huge bed festooned in crimson drapes falling from a giant ceiling-mounted golden crown.
‘What do you really think?’ Vitale prompted as she bent to open her case and extract a change of clothing.
‘It’s hideous but I’m sure the antiques are worth a fortune and very historic,’ she added in a rush, recognising that she might just have been tactless in the extreme.
‘We could put them in storage and refurnish. It’s not my style either,’ Vitale admitted, stepping behind her to unknot the satin lacing closing the back of her dress. ‘But Edmondo is a stickler for tradition and this is where the owner of the palazzo has always slept.’
‘My goodness, your predecessors must’ve enjoyed their pomp and ceremony.’ Zara shivered a little as cooler air brushed her bare shoulder blades and the fitted bodice of her gown loosened and fell forward. ‘While you’re a dab hand at unlacing.’
Vitale bent his head and pressed his lips to the tender side of her throat where a tiny pulse was going crazy. Lingering to enjoy her smooth, delicately perfumed skin, he used his mouth to nuzzle the soft skin there. His attention to that particular spot was unbearably arousing and a helpless gasp was wrenched from her as streamers of fire shot to every erotic zone she possessed. Stretching back against him for support, she caught her reflection in one of the wardrobe mirrors. She looked wanton, possessed, her hair shimmering round her shoulders, her face turned up eagerly to his, her breasts swelling and straining over the slightly too small cups of her lace strapless bra.
‘I look like a shameless hussy,’ she cried in embarrassment, her hands reaching down to pull up her dress again.
‘Shameless works a treat for me, angelina mia,’
Vitale told her, his hands releasing her hold from the fabric so that her gown slid off her hips and down to her ankles. He lifted her out of the entangling folds and brought her down on the bed where he studied her scantily clad body with smouldering appreciation. ‘You look gorgeous, Signora Roccanti.’
Selfconscious heat seemed to flood Zara from her head to her toes. She felt as though she were burning up inside her skin while her nipples tingled into straining buds and the tender flesh at the heart of her tingled with awareness. Dispensing with his tie, his waistcoat and his jacket and shoes, he lay down beside her, eyes full of anticipation. Zara propped herself up on her elbows, secure in his admiration, satisfied that she was both wanted and desired. He captured her lips with devastatingly erotic urgency so that even before he eased a small breast free of the bra her breath was parting her lips in rapid, uneven gasps. He rubbed the stiff rosy peak between thumb and forefinger and then dropped his mouth there to tease the throbbing tip with his lips and his tongue. As he simultaneously stroked the band of taut silk fabric stretched between her legs and felt the dampness there he groaned out loud. ‘I’ve been fantasising about this moment for weeks,’ he confided in a roughened undertone.
Only as he undid her bra to remove it did he spot the small blue badge she had attached to it. ‘What’s this?’ he questioned.
‘The something blue from the wedding luck rhyme and to remind me of my brother. He got it at school for playing rugby or something,’ she muttered vaguely.
‘I didn’t even know you had a brother.’
‘Tom was my twin. But he died in a car crash two years ago.’ Flinching from her poignant recollections, she let her fingers delve into his tousled black hair to draw his mouth back to hers again and when he took her invitation to stop talking and kiss her it was so exhilarating that all sad memories left her head.
Her bra melted away, quickly followed by her panties. Vitale reared back on his knees to shed his remaining garments with a great deal more haste than cool. She revelled in his impatience, his eagerness to make love to her.
‘I wanted this to be slow and perfect, unlike the last time,’ Vitale admitted in a tone of frustration.
‘Human beings don’t do perfect,’ she quipped, lifting a slender hand to run her fingertips gently down hi
s cheek. ‘And I don’t expect it.’
‘But you should,’ Vitale informed her, eyes welded to her like padlocks.
With a gentle laugh of disagreement she arched her back below the hands curving to the pert swell of her sensitised breasts.
‘Is it my imagination or is there more of you than there was a few weeks ago?’ he teased.
‘Falling pregnant does have some advantages,’ she told him seductively. ‘Alcohol may not be a good idea but I’m getting very bosomy indeed.’
Vitale laughed and kissed her breathless. She quivered as he found her clitoris with the ball of his thumb and pleasured her, gently delving and stroking until she moaned in helpless response to his stimulation. She was twisting and turning, her hips rising long before he rose over her and eased into her honeyed depths in a long deep thrust that sent a wave of excitement currenting through her.
‘Don’t stop,’ she told him at an ecstatic peak of pleasure when it was a challenge to even find her voice.
She couldn’t lie still as his fluid movements grew more insistent, more passionate and the intolerable tightness and tension within her gathered with every heartbeat and then exploded into an earthshaking climax. She hit that high with a startled cry of delight that she muffled by burying her mouth in a strong brown shoulder. She was as weak as a kitten once the tingling ripples of rapture had slowly coursed away from her again.
‘I don’t want to stroke your ego but that … that was perfect,’ Zara whispered shakily, her hands sliding down from his shoulders to his back and instinctively massaging the roughened skin there with a gentle touch. ‘What happened to you?’ she asked him abruptly.
His muscles jerked taut below her fingers, and he stared down at her with bleak eyes. ‘I was beaten, tortured as a child by my stepfather. He went to prison for it.’
