Second-Time Bride (HQR Presents)

by Lynne Graham

  ‘In what way was I greedy?’ Daisy pressed in ever growing bewilderment. ‘I took nothing from you or your family.’

  ‘You call half a million pounds nothing?’

  A furrow formed between her delicate brows. ‘But I refused the money. Your father tried very hard to make me accept it but I refused.’

  ‘You’re a liar.’ Alessio’s eloquent mouth twisted with derision. ‘My father was not the leading light in that deal. You made the demand. He paid up only because he was foolishly trying to protect me.’

  ‘I didn’t demand anything… and I didn’t accept any money either!’ Daisy protested heatedly.

  Alessio dealt her a look of complete indifference that cut like a knife. ‘I don’t even know why I mentioned it. That pay-off was the tacky but merciful end to a very sordid little affair.’

  Daisy bit the soft underside of her lower lip and tasted the acrid tang of her own blood. The pain steadied her a little. Alessio’s father, Vittorio, had obviously lied. Clearly he had told his son that she had accepted the money. And why should that lie surprise her? The Leopardi clan had loathed her on sight. His parents had tried hard to hide the fact when Alessio was around, but his twin sister, Bianca, had shown her hostility openly. Daisy stared into space, her whole being engulfed by a powerful wave of remembered pain and rejection.

  In the swirling oblivion of that tide of memory she relived the heady scent of lush grass bruised by their lovemaking, the kiss of the Tuscan sun on her skin and the passionate weight and urgency of Alessio’s lean body on hers. Broken dreams and lost innocence. Her eyes burned, her small frame tensing defensively. Why had nobody ever told her how much loving could hurt and destroy? By the time she had found out that reality, the damage had been done and her reward had been guilt and despair. A ‘sordid little affair’? No, for her it had been so much more, and it was in the divergence of outlook that the seeds of disaster had been sown…

  The clink of glass dredged her back from her dangerous passage into the past. Her lashes fluttered in confusion as Alessio leant lithely forward and slotted a brandy goblet between her nerveless fingers. ‘You look like you are about to pass out.’

  Faint colour feathered then into Daisy’s drawn cheeks. She watched him help himself to a drink from the cabinet, every movement calm and precise. He did not look as though he was about to pass out. Although if he ever found out about Tara he might well make good the oversight. Hurriedly, she crushed that disturbing, foolish thought. Alessio had never wanted their baby.

  At nineteen, Alessio had been able to think of an awful lot of things he wanted but they had not included a baby. So, knowing that, why on earth had she let him marry her? And yet the answer to that was so simple. She had honestly believed that he loved her…deep down inside…even though he hadn’t been showing it any more. It was amazing what a besotted teenage girl could persuade herself to believe, she conceded painfully.

  ‘And you are wearing odd shoes,’ Alessio remarked in a curiously flat tone.

  A feeling of unreality was starting to enclose Daisy but she also sensed that Alessio was not as in control as he wanted to appear. She surveyed her feet, saw one black court shoe, one navy. It didn’t bother her. In the midst of a nightmare encounter, unmatched shoes were a triviality. She drained the brandy in one gulp. It sent fire chasing into the chilled pit of her stomach. She swallowed convulsively. ‘I wasn’t supposed to be working today. I came out in a hurry.’

  ‘You’ve cut your hair.’

  Daisy lifted an uncertain hand halfway to her shoulder-length bob of shining silver-blonde hair, connected with brilliant eyes and wondered why time seemed to be slowing up, why they were now having this curiously stilted conversation when barely a minute ago they had been arguing. ‘Yes. It’s easier to manage.’

  Alessio was running that narrowed, gleaming gaze over her slight figure in a manner which made her feel incredibly hot and uncomfortable. A wolfish smile gradually curved his hard mouth as he lounged back with innate grace in the seat opposite. ‘You don’t seem to have much to say to me…’

  She wasn’t about to tell him that he was still gorgeous. Even as a teenager he had known that and had shamelessly utilised that spectacular combination of smouldering dark good looks and animal sex appeal to his own advantage. He had used it on Daisy—dug his own grave, really, when she thought about it. She had been agonisingly naïve and had fallen like a ton of bricks for him, defenceless against that polished seduction routine of his.

  ‘You’re still full of yourself,’ Daisy told him helplessly.

  A faint darkening of colour accentuated the slant of his chiselled cheekbones, his tawny eyes flaring with momentary disconcertion.

  She loosed a sudden laugh, sharp in its lack of humour. ‘But then why shouldn’t you be?’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I think it means that you should get me out of this car before I say something we both regret,’ Daisy admitted tightly, feeling all the volatile emotions she had buried so long ago rising up inside her without warning.

  Alessio slung her a knowing look redolent of a male who knew women and prided himself on the fact. ‘You never forget your first love.’

  ‘Or what a bastard he was…’ The assurance was out before Daisy could stop it.

  Alessio’s long, lithe frame tensed—a reaction which gave her a quite extraordinary surge of satisfaction. Shimmering eyes lanced into her with stark incredulity. ‘How can you say that to me?’

  ‘Because being married to you was the worst experience of my life,’ Daisy informed him, throwing her head high.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘And, believe me, I didn’t require a financial bribe to persuade me into a quick exit! You were domineering, selfish and completely insensitive to what I was going through,’ Daisy condemned in a shaking voice that steadily crept up in volume in spite of her attempt to control it. ‘You left me at the mercy of your totally monstrous family and allowed them to treat me like dirt! You stopped talking to me but that did not stop you using my body whenever you felt like it!’

  Alessio was transfixed. There was no other word for his reaction. The Daisy he had married would never have criticised him. In those days, Daisy had crept around being quiet and apologetic while silently, miserably adoring him, no matter what treatment he handed out. Alessio had accepted the adoration as his right. She hadn’t had the guts to stand up to him then, not when she had mistakenly blamed herself for the fact that he had had to marry her.

  ‘In fact you went into a three-month-long sulk the same day that you married me! And the minute your obnoxious family saw how you were behaving they all jumped on the same bandwagon. I didn’t just have one person making my life a living hell, I had a whole crowd!’ she spelt out fiercely. ‘And I don’t care how any of you felt; I was only seventeen and I was pregnant and I did not deserve that kind of punishment!’

  Daisy fell silent then. She was shattered, genuinely shattered by the bitterness that had surged up in her and overflowed. Until now she had not appreciated how deep her bitterness ran. But then she had not had an opportunity to vent those feelings before. Within forty-eight hours of her miscarriage, Vittorio Leopardi had presented her with divorce papers. And, sick to the heart from all that she had already undergone and Alessio’s cruel indifference, she had signed without a word of argument.

  ‘So, when you took the money and ran, you thought it was your due,’ Alessio opined grittily.

  She stole a dazed glance at him from beneath her feathery lashes. His darkly handsome features were fiercely taut. ‘I ran but I didn’t take any money,’ she muttered wearily, and then wondered why she was still bothering to defend herself. When it came to a choice between her word and his father’s, she had no doubt about whose Alessio would believe. And it wouldn’t be hers.

  ‘I despised you for what you did,’ Alessio admitted with driven emphasis. ‘And to listen now to you abusing my family makes me very angry.’

>   ‘I doubt if I’ll lose any sleep over that.’ Yet Daisy’s heartbeat suffered a lurch when she met that anger brightening his hard gaze. Her chin came up, defying the sudden chill of her flesh. She had said her piece. She had waited thirteen years to say it and there wasn’t a single word of it which she could honestly have taken back. How could he still behave as if he had been the only one wronged?

  When she had discovered that her miscarriage had not been quite what it had appeared, she hadn’t dreamt of bothering Alessio or his family with what would have been very bad news in their opinion. Indeed, still loving Alessio as she had, she had felt positively heroic protecting him from such an unwelcome announcement. He had wanted neither her nor their child, so she had taken care of the problem. She had kept her mouth shut, let the divorce proceed without interruption and brought her baby into the world alone. Alessio owed her! He had been able to get on with his life again, unhampered by all the many adult responsibilities that had become hers at far too young an age.

  The limousine had stopped. She hadn’t noticed. She gazed out at the elegant Georgian square and simply knew that she could not bear another single minute in Alessio’s company. There was too much pain and confusion biting at her.

  ‘I’m going to catch a cab back to the office and say you cancelled,’ Daisy told him abruptly. ‘Then you can come back on Monday if you like and see the house with someone else.’

  ‘I don’t think your boss would swallow that story.’ Alessio’s shrewd gaze lingered on her and his expressive mouth took on a curious quirk.

  ‘I don’t care!’ Daisy stared back at him defiantly.

  ‘So you still make stupid decisions on the spur of the moment.’

  Colour ran up in a hot, betraying flush beneath her fine skin. She knew exactly what he was getting at. ‘Shut up!’ she hissed back.

  ‘And you still blush like a furnace around me… in spite of your advanced years,’ Alessio chided with lazy enjoyment at her embarrassment. ‘And, in spite of my advanced years, you still turn me on hard and fast. Now isn’t that fascinating?’

  Daisy couldn’t believe he had said that. The tip of her tongue stole out in a swift flick to moisten her lower lip. Involuntarily she connected with eyes that now blazed passionate gold, his ebony lashes low on his lingering scrutiny. The heavy silence stretched like a rubber band pulled too taut for safety.

  ‘If this is your idea of a joke…’ she began unevenly.

  Alessio surveyed her with slumbrous intensity and a slow, devastating smile curved his mouth. ‘Don’t be pious. You’re feeling the same thing I’m feeling right now.’

  Her breath was trapped in her throat. Daisy could not tear her bemused eyes from the potent lure of his. And it was not an unfamiliar sensation that was creeping over her, she registered in dizzy disbelief; it was an old but never forgotten sensation of quite incredible excitement. The whole atmosphere had a wild, electric charge. Her heartbeat was thundering in her eardrums, her whole body stretched and tight with every nerve-ending ready to leap.

  ‘Curiosity and excitement,’ Alessio enumerated with purring softness.

  It was fatal to be so easily read but Daisy couldn’t help herself. Slowly but surely she was sinking back to the level of maturity she had reached at the time of the party at which they had first met, and she remembered the sheer, terrifying whoosh of emotion and response which Alessio had evoked in her even at a distance of twenty feet. One look and she had been trembling, pitched on such a high of breathless, desperate yearning that she had felt slaughtered when he’d looked away again. ‘Stop it…’ she muttered shakily.

  ‘I can’t. I like to live dangerously now and again,’ Alessio revealed huskily.

  ‘I don’t…’ But her wretched body was not so scrupulous. She was devastated to feel her breasts, now full and heavy, surge against the lace barrier of her bra, the swollen nipples tightening into shameless, aching peaks.

  ‘How would you feel about an afternoon of immoral, erotic rediscovery?’ Alessio murmured thickly, his scorching golden eyes, as hot as flames, dancing over her heated skin. ‘I’ll take you to a hotel. For a few stolen hours, we leave the anger and the bitterness behind and relive the passion…’

  Daisy was stunned, and on another level she was recalling the end of that long-ago party when Alessio had finally deigned to speak to her and make the smoothest pass she had ever encountered. She had been stunned then too by his sheer nerve. His brazen disregard of what she had naïvely seen as normal courting rituals had shocked her rigid. He had planted a drink in her hand and asked her to go to bed with him that night. She had slapped his face.

  He had grinned. Tomorrow night?’ he had asked with unconcealed amusement in his beautiful eyes, and she should have known then that it would take more than one slap to dent that ego.

  ‘Daisy…’ Alessio breathed.

  This time she came back to the present with a sense of intense pain. Her violent eyes were starkly vulnerable; she veiled them. All of a sudden she felt horribly cold and lost. ‘I don’t want to relive the passion,’ she told him tightly. ‘Yes, you were quite incredible in bed but I wouldn’t let you use me like that again.. Once was enough. You’re trying to put me down this time too. That’s one advantage of being a grown-up: I can see the writing on the wall.’

  The endless silence pulsed with fierce undertones.

  ‘I cannot believe I am even having this conversation with you!’ Alessio gritted with ferocious abruptness.

  ‘I suppose it’s comforting to know that you haven’t changed. You’re still a two-timing, oversexed, immoral rat,’ Daisy muttered in a choky little voice, valiantly fighting off the threat of the tears damming up behind her burning eyes, ready to spill over.

  ‘I am none of those things!’ Alessio blistered back at her.

  ‘Creep,’ Daisy spat, making a dive to get out of the car. ‘You really are one lousy creep to do this to me! Do you think I’m a whore or something? Do you think I don’t know you’re trying to humiliate me?’

  A strong hand suddenly whipped out to capture one of hers, holding her back. ‘It was an unfortunate impulse. I don’t know what came over me. Call it temporary insanity if you like,’ he growled savagely. ‘I’m sorry!’

  ‘Let go of me!’

  He did, and Daisy wrenched open the door and almost fell out onto the pavement, sucking in a great gulp of fresh air as she did so. She was shaking like a leaf. She took a tottering step away from the limousine, her gait that of someone who had escaped a traumatic brush with death.

  ‘And it’s really pathetic to still be shooting the same lines at your age!’ she slung back at him for good measure.

  ‘Dio…will you keep your voice down?’ Alessio roared at her, causing an elderly lady walking an apricot poodle to step off the pavement with a frown of well-bred disapproval and give the two of them a very wide berth.

  Daisy stole a glance at Alessio, took in the shaken look of uncertainty currently clouding his normally sharp-as-paint gaze and grew in stature with the knowledge that he was handling their unexpected encounter no better than she was. Memories from their volatile teenage years and the effects of shock were driving a horse and cart through any effort they made to behave like civilised, intelligent adults.

  ‘Look, do you want to see this house or don’t you?’ she asked stiffly.

  ‘If you will control your tongue and stop hurling insults, I see no reason why we should not deal with this on a normal business footing,’ Alessio drawled with icy control.

  CHAPTER TWO

  AN HOUR and a half later, Daisy surveyed the elegant hall of the Georgian house for the hundredth time and wondered how much more time the owners would spend entertaining Alessio. Her presence had not been required to give the grand tour, oh, dear, no!

  The Raschids had stayed in specially when they had learnt that Alessio Leopardi was coming to view their beautiful home. Mr Raschid was a diplomat and apparently had met Alessio at an embassy dinner last year. Eager to
renew that acquaintance, the couple had lost no time in telling Daisy to wait in the hall, while assuring Alessio that they would give him a far more interesting tour than she could. Well, she would have been rather out of her depth in a three-way conversation taking place in Arabic.

  Alessio hadn’t looked at her again. Suddenly she had acquired all the invisibility of a lowly maid. And that was how it should be. Like the Raschids, he was a client, just another client, and clients, particularly very wealthy ones, frequently treated the agency staff as something slightly less than human. When she thought about it, their romance thirteen years ago had broken all the class and status rules—Alessio the adored only son of the Leopardi banking dynasty and Daisy the au pair working down the road from his family’s palatial summer villa.

  They had not one single thing in common. Alessio had grown up as part of a close-knit, supportive family circle but Daisy had lost both her parents by the time she was six. Her elderly grandparents had brought her up. Her entire childhood had been filled with loss and death and sudden change. She had never had security. Illness and old age had taken everyone she cared about until her mother’s sister had taken her turn of guardianship when Daisy was sixteen. A career teacher in her late thirties, Janet had encouraged her niece to be more independent than her own parents had allowed. But she had been dubious when Daisy had initially suggested spending the summer before her final year at school working as an au pair.

  ‘I bet you land a ghastly family who treat you like a skivvy and expect you to slave for them day and night,’ Janet had forecast worriedly.

  In fact, Daisy had been very lucky. The agency had matched her up with a friendly, easygoing couple who owned a small villa in Tuscany and went there every summer with their children. The Morgans had given her plenty of time off and Liz Morgan had gone out of her way to see that Daisy met other young people. The very first week, Daisy had been invited to the party where she’d met Alessio.