‘Y-You don’t understand,’ she groaned as she wrenched her mouth free of him. ‘I need to—’
‘I have no wish to understand,’ was his arrogant reply. But it was hoarsely said, and the look on his face was the one Luisa would call his frightened expression. ‘You are mine! You know you are!’ And on that he picked her up and began striding inside with the grim-faced, hard-eyed, burning intention of ravishing her—Catherine knew that.
‘You just said that you wanted no more lies between us!’ She tried to plead with him for reason. ‘Well, at least give me a chance to be as honest with you as you have just been with me!’
‘No.’ The refusal was blunt and uncompromising as he fell with her onto the bed.
‘I do love you!’ she cried—and effectively brought him to a stop just as his mouth was about to take hers prisoner.
‘Say that again,’ he commanded.
‘I love you,’ she responded obediently. ‘But I have a terrible confession to make, Vito!’ she hurried on anxiously. ‘And I need you to listen before you—’
‘If you are going to admit that you and Marcus Templeton were lovers,’ he cut in, ‘then believe me, Catherine, when I tell you that I do not want to hear it!’
‘Marcus and I were never lovers,’ she shakily assured him.
His eyes drew shut, long dark lashes curling over dark golden iris in an effort to hide his deep sense of relief. And Catherine’s teeth pressed deep indentations into her lower lip as she waited while some of the fierce tension began to ease out of him.
She watched those eyelids rise up again slowly to show her the eyes of a man who was not quite as driven by fear any more, though still dark and dynamic, with the kind of inherent passions that curled around the soul.
‘Okay,’ he invited grimly. ‘Make your damned confession and get it over with.’
‘I do love you,’ she repeated urgently. ‘I always have! Wh-which—which is why I just couldn’t do it!’
‘Do what?’ he frowned.
She lost courage, and with it the words to speak. So instead she kissed him gently, softly, tenderly. But her heart was beating like a hammer drill and, lying on top of her as he was, Vito had to be aware of it.
His head came up. ‘For goodness’ sake,’ he breathed. ‘It cannot be this bad, surely?’
The fear was filtering back into his eyes. She bit her bottom lip again. Then the tears began to flood her own eyes as she forced herself to say what had to be said.
‘I didn’t take the morning-after pills,’ she confessed in a frightened little rush of words that had him staring down at her uncomprehendingly. ‘I couldn’t, you see, wh-when it came right down to it. I mean—how could I destroy the chance of a new life we may make between us? It was just too—’
‘No,’ he cut in as understanding finally began to dawn on him. ‘You would not be so stupid.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she breathed. With trembling fingers Catherine reached up to gently cover the sudden white-ringed tension circling his mouth. ‘But I couldn’t do it. I just—couldn’t do it...’
Rolling away from her, Vito jack-knifed to his feet, then just stood staring down at her as if he didn’t know who she was. It was awful—much, much worse than she had expected it to be.
‘What is it with you?’ he demanded hoarsely. ‘Do you harbour some kind of death-wish or something?’
Catherine sat up to hug her knees and murmured shakily, ‘It was too late.’
He let out a laugh—only it wasn’t a laugh but more a burst of something else entirely. ‘No, it damn well wasn’t!’ he exploded. ‘You had seventy-two hours to take the bloody things after we made love that day!’
‘I meant it was too late for me!’ she yelled back in pained rebuttal. ‘What if we’d conceived, Vito?’ She begged for understanding. ‘It would have been like killing Santino!’
‘That’s just so much rot, Catherine, and you know it,’ he denounced. ‘You have been taking the contraceptive pill for years! What difference could a couple of extra hours be to what you do every single day?’
‘Not then.’ She shrugged. ‘But the night before, when we...’
She didn’t finish, but then she didn’t need to. Vito was well ahead of her. ‘That is no excuse,’ he denounced, ‘for putting your own life on the line!’
‘We don’t know if I have done yet,’ she pointed out. ‘But at least I can be sure that I didn’t deliberately kill another baby.’
His face turned pure white. ‘You didn’t kill the last one!’ he shouted furiously.