She glanced up at the kitchen clock, heard a sound of rustling cloth behind her and had an itchy feeling that Vito was also checking the time on his wristwatch.
Five thirty, she noted. That meant they had a whole hour and a half to endure each other’s exclusive company. Could they stand it? she wondered, counting coffee scoops into the filter jug.
‘Your hair is shorter than I remember.’
Her mind went blank, the next scoopful of coffee freezing on its way to the jug. After only just reassuring herself that he wasn’t interested in anything about her personally, it came as a shock to discover that her instincts had indeed been working perfectly.
What else had he noticed? The way her shorts tended to cling to the cleft between her buttocks? Or, worse, that as she stood like this, in profile to him, he could see the shadowy outline of her right breast through the thin white cotton?
‘I’m three years older,’ she replied, though what that was supposed to mean even she didn’t know, because she was too engrossed in a whole host of sensations that were beginning to attack her. All of them to do with sex, and sexual awareness, and this damn man, who had always been able to do this to her!
‘You don’t look it.’
And did he have to sound so grim about that?
‘You do,’ she countered in outright retaliation.
The rollercoaster of her own thoughts sent the coffee into the jug and saw the scoop abandoned onto the worktop with an angry flick of her slender wrist before she turned almost defiantly to face him, with a flat band of a false smile slapped on her face meant to show a clear disregard for his feelings.
But the smiled instantly died, melted away by the megawatt charge of his physical presence. He looked lean and mean, with his shirt hanging open at his brown throat and his jaw darkened by a five o’clock shadow. He had the arrogant nose of a Roman conqueror, the dark honeyed eyes of a charming sneak thief, and the wickedly sensual mouth of a gigolo. His body was built to fight lions in an arena, but men no longer did that to prove their prowess.
‘And memories are made of this...’ a silk-smooth voice softly taunted.
Her eyes closed and opened very slowly, bringing her fevered brain swirling back from where it had flown off to, to find him standing there taking malicious pleasure in watching her lose herself in memories of him.
It was like being caught with her hand in the sweetie jar. Sweat suddenly bathed her body, heat flushing her fine white skin—not the heat of arousal but the heat of a humiliation that completely demolished her. She didn’t know what to do; she didn’t know what to say.
‘I’ll get dressed...’ was the wretched thing she actually came out with, and forced her shaking limbs to propel her towards the door and escape—again.
But Vito was not going to let her get off as lightly as that. Oh, no, not this man, with his lethal brand of wit, who also had so many axes to grind on her exposed rear that he was almost gleeful at being given this heaven-sent opportunity.
‘Why bother?’ he therefore drawled smoothly. ‘It is already way too late to cover up what is happening to you, mia cara.’
‘I am not your darling!’ she snapped out in retaliation, knowing she was only rising to his deliberate baiting but unable to stop herself anyway.
‘Maybe not,’ he conceded. ‘But I think you are wondering what it would be like to relive those moments when you were.’
If she didn’t suffocate in her own shame then there really was no justice in the world, because it was what she deserved to do, Catherine derided herself bitterly.
‘Not with you,’ she denied, with an accompanying little shudder. ‘Never with you again.’
‘Was that a challenge? For if it was I might just take you up on it. You never know,’ he mocked. ‘It could be an—interesting exercise to see how many times we can ravish each other in the hour and a half we have free before our son comes down. It would certainly keep our minds off all our other problems...’
If the kitchen door handle had been a gun, she would probably have fired it at him. ‘And if you need to sink yourself that low just to keep your mind occupied—then call in Marietta!’ She used words to slay him with instead. ‘She always was much better trained than me at servicing all your requirements.’
So what’s really new here? she asked herself as a large hand came to land palm flat against the door to hold it shut, making her blink as it landed. ‘You may still possess the body of a siren, Catherine,’ Vito bit out, ‘but you have developed the mouth of a slut! When are you going to listen to me, you blind bitter fool, and believe me when I tell you that Marietta is not and has never been my mistress!’
She should have left it there; Catherine knew she should. She should have remained perfectly still, pinned her ‘mouth of a slut’ shut and ignored his wretched lies until he gave up and let her out of here! But she couldn’t. Vito had always been able to bring out the worst in her—and she the worst in him. They’d used to fight like sworn enemies and make love as if nothing could break them apart. It was like meeting like. His Latin fire versus her Celtish spirit. His oversized ego versus her fierce pride.
It had been a recipe for utter disaster. But for the first few blissful months of their relationship it had been a glorious blending of both passionate temperaments fused together by that wonderfully enthralling sensation she’d used to describe as—true love.
It hadn’t seemed to matter then that the words were never actually spoken, for they had been there in each look, each touch, in the way neither had seemed able to be apart from the other for more than a few hours without making contact—if only with the intimate pitch of their voices via the telephone. Even when she’d fallen pregnant and the warring had begun, she had still believed that love was the engine which had driven them towards marriage.
Meeting Marietta on her wedding day, and learning that this was the woman Vito would have chosen to marry if she had not instead married his best friend Rocco, had placed the first fragile seeds of doubt in her mind about Vito’s true feelings for her.
Yet neither by word nor gesture had Vito revealed any hint that there could be truth in the whispers, and she had very quickly managed to dismiss them when his attention towards her remained sound right through her first troubled pregnancy and into her second.
Then Rocco had been killed in a tragic boating accident, followed within weeks by Vito’s father dying from a massive stroke. And before she’d realised quite what was happening, Vito and Marietta had hardly ever been seen apart.