Married For Revenge: Roccanti's Marriage Revenge / A Deal at the Altar / A Vow of Obligation

In comparison to Sergios’ moderation, her parents’ fury had known no bounds. Things had been hurled in vicious verbal onslaughts that had almost inevitably led to Monty Blake’s raging demand that his daughter move out from below his roof. But, she acknowledged ruefully, at least her enraged father had confined himself to vocal abuse and retained some shred of control over his temper. Sadly that was not always the case.

She had done a search on the Net in an effort to dig up the story of her father and the yacht episode. The sparse facts available had left her none the wiser when it came to apportioning blame. An Asian earthquake and the resulting waves had caused the hired yacht to sink in the middle of the night. Apparently it had happened very quickly. One member of the crew and a passenger called Loredana, described as an Italian fashion model, had been listed missing, presumed drowned. When her father was already furious she had seen little point in mentioning an incident that would only madden him even more. Furthermore, if even an inquest had failed to extract any damaging admission of culpability from the older man she had little faith in the likelihood of her own persuasive powers doing a better job. And why wasn’t she being more honest with herself? She had not brought up that business with the yacht because she was frightened of pushing her father’s temper over the edge. No, she had been too much of a coward.

The studio apartment she had rented was a masterpiece of clever design in which the minimum possible space was stretched to cover the essentials but it covered nothing well, Zara conceded ruefully as she unpacked, aghast at the lack of storage space. If there was little room for the requirements of ordinary life, there was even less for Fluffy. A neighbour had already informed Zara that no pets were allowed in the building and had threatened to report her to the landlord. Just then that seemed to be the least of Zara’s worries, though. By the time she had finished shopping for bed linen, food and kitchen necessities, the balance in her bank account had shrunk alarmingly. Bearing in mind that she had only the small salary she could draw from her late aunt’s business, she would have to learn to do without things if she didn’t want to run into debt. Now that she was in a position to work full-time it would have suited her to dispense with Rob’s services as manager, but, owing to Zara’s dyslexia and the restrictions it imposed, Rob had become an essential component in the successful running of the business.

She went to bed early on her first night in the apartment. The instant she closed her eyes in a silence disturbed only by the sounds of traffic the anguish she had fought off to the best of her ability all day flooded back: the intense sense of loss and betrayal, the conviction that she had to be the most stupid woman ever born, the swelling, wounding ache of deep hurt. And she walled up that giant mess of turmoil and self-loathing, shut it out and reminded herself that tomorrow was another day.

That same week in his Florence head office, Vitale’s oft-admired powers of concentration let him down repeatedly in meetings when his mind would drift and his shrewd dark eyes would steadily lose their usual needle-sharp focus. The teasing image of a tiny blonde haunted his sleep and shadowed his working hours with unfamiliar introspection. By night he dreamt of Zara Blake in all sorts of erotic scenarios doing all sorts of highly arousing things to his insatiable body. Evidently with her in a starring role his imagination took flight.

Even a resolute procession of cold showers failed to chase the pain of his constant lingering arousal and, being innately practical, he immediately sought a more effective solution to his overactive libido. Since Zara had returned to the UK he had dined out with two different women, taken another to the opera and accompanied a fourth to a charity event. All were extremely attractive and entertaining. Any one of them would have slept with him without attaching strings to the occasion, but not one of those women had tempted him and for the first time he had found himself actively avoiding intimate situations. He had also discovered flaws in all four women and now asked himself when he had become so very hard to please. But while he loathed constant female chatter one of the women had proved too quiet, another had had a very irritating laugh, the third had talked incessantly about shopping and the fourth had constantly searched out her own reflection in mirrors.

Every day Vitale had all the key English newspapers delivered to his office and he skimmed through them mid-morning over his coffee without once admitting to himself what he was actually on the lookout for. Yet every day he contrived to take his coffee break just a little earlier. During the second week, however, he finally hit the jackpot when he saw the photo of Zara with another man. He frowned, at first wondering who the good-looking blond male by her side was. She looked tinier than ever pictured with a suitcase almost as big as she was. He read between the lines of the gossip column below. Her family was angry enough with her to throw her out of their home? What else was he supposed to think?

Vitale was very much shocked, mentally picturing a puppy being dumped at the side of a busy motorway, a puppy with no notion of how to avoid the car wheels racing past. Monty Blake’s daughter, surely spoiled and indulged all her life to date, could have few survival skills to fall back on. Honed to a cutting edge by a very much tougher background and much more humble beginnings, Vitale was appalled on her behalf. He had not foreseen such a far-reaching consequence but he felt that he should have done. After all, the loss of Sergios Demonides as a son-in-law would have been a major disappointment and Monty Blake was not the type of man to deal gracefully with such a setback. Evidently he had taken his ire out on his only child.

Feeling disturbingly responsible for that development, Vitale lifted the phone and organised a flight to London in his private jet that evening. He only wanted to check that she was all right, that was all, nothing more complex, certainly nothing personal, although if she turned out to have conceived, he conceded broodingly, matters would swiftly become a great deal more personal. Vitale, after all, knew that he would be the last man alive to take a casual approach to an unplanned pregnancy. He knew too well the potential drawbacks of such a route. It took another couple of phone calls to establish where Zara was staying and the unwelcome gossip he received along with that information persuaded him that Monty Blake’s daughter must be having a pretty tough time.

But why should that matter to him? Vitale frowned heavily, deeply ill-at-ease with his reactions. Why did he feel so accountable for what might happen to her? While Vitale was, at least, a free agent Zara had chosen to betray the trust of the man she had promised to marry. She was a faithless liar without a conscience, the spoilt daughter of a man he loathed. But he still could not shake the recollection that he had been Zara’s one and only lover. The reflection that he had been wrong about her on that score made him wonder whether there could be other things he might have been wrong about as well. And for a man as self-assured as he was that was a ground-breaking shift in outlook.

The next day, Vitale called at Zara’s apartment at nine in the morning. Even before he entered the building he was asking himself why the hell he was making a social call on the daughter of his enemy. He might have got her pregnant, he reminded himself with fierce reluctance, his handsome mouth down curving. If there was a child he had a duty of care towards her and until he knew one way or the other he could not turn his back on her and ignore her predicament. Born into a comfortable background, she had enjoyed a sheltered upbringing, so how was she coping without that safety net?

Vitale stepped out of the lift on Zara’s floor and right into a heated dispute. A burly older man was standing at Zara’s front door saying aggressively, ‘This isn’t open to negotiation—either the rabbit goes or you move out! ‘

Zara gave him a stricken look. ‘But that’s—’

‘No pets of any kind. You signed the rent agreement and you’re in breach of the conditions,’ he pronounced loudly. ‘I want that animal out of here today or I’m giving you notice to quit.’

‘I don’t have anywhere else to take her,’ Zara was arguing heatedly.

‘Not my problem,’ the landlord told her, swinging on his heel and striding into the lift that Vitale had only just vacated.

Only as Vitale moved forward did Zara register his presence and her eyes flew wide, her lips parting in furious surprise and dismay. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

CHAPTER SIX

AT first glimpse of Vitale, shock shrouded Zara like a cocoon, so that external sounds seemed to come from a very long way away. The traffic noise, the doors opening and closing in the busy life of the building faded fast into the background. As her landlord stomped angrily away, offended by her combative stance, Vitale took his place. Even at a glance, Vitale looked fabulously, irretrievably Italian in a faultlessly cut grey business suit that had that unmistakeable edge of designer style. From his cropped black hair and staggeringly good bone structure to his tall, well-built body, he was a breathtakingly handsome man.

But it hurt to look at him, and as Zara felt the pain of his deception afresh her anger ignited like a roaring flame. Her eyes cloaked, hiding her vulnerability. He hadn’t cared about her, hadn’t even really wanted her for herself. He had simply used her as a weapon to strike at her father. ‘What do you want?’ she asked, her intonation sharp with anger. ‘And how did you find out where I was living?’

‘I have my sources,’ Vitale fielded, his stunning dark deep-set eyes trained on her to track any changes.

Casually clad in cropped trousers and flip-flops, she seemed smaller and younger than he had recalled but, if anything, even more beautiful. Her creamy natural skin was flawless. The wealth of silvery waves falling round her narrow shoulders was bright as a beacon, providing the perfect frame for delicate features dominated by wide lavender eyes and an impossibly full and tempting pink mouth. And that fast Vitale wanted her again. The tightening heaviness at his groin was a response that unnerved him more than a little. He operated very much on cold, clever logic—he had no time and even less understanding of anything uncontrolled or foolish. He could not compute the sheer irrational absurdity of such an attraction when he had remained indifferent to so many more suitable women. In self-defence, he immediately sought out her flaws. She was too small, her hair was too bright, she talked like an express train rarely pausing for breath and much of it was totally superfluous stuff. But in defiance of popular report, he recalled abstractedly, she was anything but stupid. She had a quirky sense of humour and very quick wits.

While Vitale looked her up and down as though he had every right to do so, his face sardonic and uninformative, Zara’s resentment merely took on a sharper edge. ‘You still haven’t told me what you’re doing here.’ Her heart-shaped face had tightened, irate colour stealing into her cheeks as she belatedly grasped the most likely reason for his reappearance, and she winced in discomfiture. ‘Oh, of course, you want to know if—’

‘May I come in?’ Vitale incised, not being a fan of holding intimate conversations in public places.

‘I don’t want to let you in but I suppose I don’t have much choice,’ Zara countered ungraciously, reflecting that far from worrying about the possibility of an accidental pregnancy she had shelved the concern in Italy and had refused to think about it again when it seemed that she had so many more pressing things to worry about.

A thumping noise broke the tense silence. At Vitale’s entrance, Fluffy thumped the floor with her hind feet in protest and let out a squeal of fright before hotfooting it for her hutch.

Vitale was even more taken aback by the display. ‘You keep a … rabbit indoors?’ he queried, his only prior experience of rabbits being the belief that people either shot them or ate them and sometimes both.

‘Yes, Fluffy’s my pet. She’s nervous of men,’ Zara remarked, wishing she had been as sensibly wary as Fluffy when she had first met him, for it might have protected her from harm.

Indeed in a rage of antipathy, she was looking fixedly at Vitale. Somehow she couldn’t stop looking and all of a sudden and without the smallest warning she was recalling much more of that night in the love nest in the Tuscan hills than was necessary or decent. She remembered the early morning light gleaming over the black density of his tousled hair. She had run her fingers through that hair before she ran them over the corrugated flatness of his incredibly muscular torso and traced the silken length of his shaft, exploring him in a way she had never wanted or needed to explore any other man. Her heart was beating so fast in remembrance of those intimacies that she wanted to press a hand against it to slow it down before it banged so hard it burst loose from her chest.

‘I don’t know if I’m pregnant or not yet,’ she admitted frankly, descending straight to the prosaic in the hope of bringing herself back down to planet earth again, safe from such dangerous mental wanderings. He might be gorgeous but he was her enemy and a callous con artist and she hated him for what he had done to her.

Still disconcerted by the presence of a bunny rabbit whose quivering nose was poking out of the elaborate hutch, Vitale frowned, uneasy with a situation he had never been in before. The sort of lovers he usually had took precautions and accidents didn’t happen, or at least if they did they were kept quiet, he acknowledged cynically. ‘I believe there are tests you can do.’

‘I’ll buy one and let you know the result when I’ve done it,’ she muttered carelessly. ‘But right now I’ve got more important things to worry about—’ Vitale raised a brow. ‘Such as … what exactly?’ ‘Fluffy, my pet rabbit—what am I going to do with her? My neighbour has already lodged a complaint and you heard the landlord! He wouldn’t budge an inch. He’s going to chuck me out of here if I don’t rehome Fluffy!’ she exclaimed.

‘Rules are rules,’ Vitale pronounced, a little out of his depth when it came to keeping pets because he had never had one of any kind. It was a challenge for him to understand the depth of her attachment to the animal, but her distraught expression did get the message across. Growing exasperation gripped him. ‘Perhaps you could give the rabbit away.’

Zara dealt him a furious look of condemnation. ‘I couldn’t give Fluffy away!’ she gasped. ‘She’s been with me since my sixteenth birthday and I love her. Thanks to you I’ve been put through an awful lot of grief over the last couple of weeks but I can cope with it because I’m strong.’

Vitale was still very much focused on what was most important to him and detached from the rabbit scenario. ‘I’ll buy you a pregnancy test and bring it back here—’

‘Don’t put yourself out!’ Zara slung him a seething look of hatred that startled him, for he had not appreciated that those lavender eyes could telegraph that amount of aversion.

Vitale compressed his sensual mouth and heaved a sigh. ‘I must. I’m equally involved in this situation and I can’t relax until we have found out where we stand.’

‘Well, if wondering about where you stand is all you’re worrying about I can help you right now!’ Zara fired back at him. ‘I hate you. If I find out I’m pregnant, I’ll hate you even more. What will I do? I’ll trail you through every court in the land for financial support and I’ll hope it embarrasses the hell out of you!’

Vitale dealt her a seething look of impatience. ‘If you are pregnant you won’t have to trail me through a court for financial support. I would pick up the bills without argument.’

Unimpressed by that declaration and cringing at the unhappy thought of being beholden to him, Zara stood so straight her spine ached and her eyes glowed like embers in a banked down fire. ‘Then I’ll fight not to accept your financial support!’ she slung back.

Vitale was not slow on the uptake and he got the message that whatever it took she was currently out for his blood. As there was nothing that whet his appetite more than a challenge, a sardonic smile slashed his wonderfully well-shaped mouth. She didn’t know who she was dealing with. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ he warned her before he turned on his heel.

‘You’re not the Terminator,’ she told his back acidly before the lift doors closed on him.

Vitale, her sleek sophisticated banker, had gone to buy her a pregnancy test, surely a humble task beneath his high-powered notice? He was not hers, she scolded herself angrily, marvelling that such a designation had even occurred to her. Why was she even speaking to him? Her period was already four days late, a fact she had kept pushed to the back of her mind because she already had more than she could handle on her plate. Usually, however, she was as regular as clockwork in that department, so her disrupted cycle was a source of concern. She stroked Fluffy, inwardly admitting that she really didn’t want to do a test yet because she much preferred to keep her spirits up by concentrating on sunnier prospects. My goodness, she reflected with a creeping feeling of apprehension, becoming a single parent in her current circumstances would be a nightmare.

Within the hour, Vitale returned and handed her a carrier bag. Zara extracted, not one, but four different boxes containing pregnancy-testing kits.

‘I had no idea which you would prefer,’ Vitale declared without a shade of discomfiture. Zara dug into the biggest box and extracted the instructions. The print was so tiny she couldn’t read it and the diagram just blurred. Her hand shook, a sense of intense humiliation threatening to eat her alive and turning her skin clammy with perspiration. ‘Go home,’ she told him shakily.

‘Why? I might as well wait.’ Vitale’s impatience to know the result was etched on his face and hummed from his taut restive stance. He lifted one of the other boxes. ‘Use that one. From what I read on the box I understand it can give an immediate result.’

Grateful for that information, Zara took it and unwrapped it, spreading out the instructions on the table with a careful hand, squinting down at it as calmly as she could in an unsuccessful attempt to focus on the minuscule print. All she could see was a blur of mismatched symbols. She thought it was most probably her mood and the awful awareness that she had an audience that was making her dyslexia even worse than it usually was. She needed to stay calm and focused but just at that instant her self-discipline was absent.

‘What’s wrong?’ Vitale queried rather curtly.

Zara breathed in slow and deep. ‘The print is so small I can’t read it,’ she complained.

Assuming that she had imperfect sight but was not prepared to own up to the fact or indeed have anything done about it, Vitale suppressed a groan and lifted the sheet to read the relevant sentences. Zara would have much preferred to have read it herself. Her cheeks flared red and hot but, veiling her gaze, she made no comment. As she locked herself into the tiny shower room with the kit she thought that anything was better than him discovering the truth about her affliction.

Only when Zara reached sixth form had a concerned teacher asked her mother to allow an educational psychologist to test her daughter. Identified as severely dyslexic, Zara had finally been offered the assistance that she needed to catch up with her peers. Unfortunately by that stage her self-esteem had sunk to rock-bottom and she had been unable to believe that reasonable exam grades might be within her reach. Her father, after all, had immediately dismissed her dyslexia as a ‘poor excuse for stupidity’ and had refused to credit the existence of such a condition.

Although a speech-language therapist had been recommended to teach Zara how to handle the problem, her father had refused to consider that option, saying it would be a waste of time and money. Unsurprisingly Zara had never recovered from her father’s shame and disgust at the news that his daughter suffered from something labelled ‘a learning disability’. It was a subject never ever mentioned in her home but she often suspected it was the main reason why her parents continued to look on her as some sort of perpetual child, rather than the adult that she was.

Zara stood in the shower room with her attention on the novelty wall clock left behind by a previous tenant, refusing to allow herself to simply stare at the test to see if it had changed colour. The waiting time up, she straightened her shoulders and finally directed her gaze to the tiny viewing window on the test wand and there was the line of confirmation that she had most feared to see. Her legs almost buckled beneath her and she broke out in a cold sweat of horror.

Wrenching open the door, Zara reeled out. ‘It’s bad news, I’m afraid,’ she proclaimed jaggedly.

‘Let me see.’ Accustomed to trusting in only his own powers of observation, Vitale insisted on checking the test. He might have paled had his attention not been on Zara, who was displaying more than enough shock and consternation for both of them.

‘You can leave now,’ she told him woodenly. But Vitale stayed where he was, his attention involuntarily fixing to her flat stomach. A baby, she was going to have his baby. He was going to have a child with Monty Blake’s daughter. He was utterly appalled at the news. A selfish moment of inattention in the heat of passion was all it had taken to permanently change both their lives. Yet he more than anyone had known the potential cost of such negligence and had the least excuse for the oversight, he conceded with stormy self-loathing.

‘I can’t simply leave you like this,’ Vitale declared with a harsh edge to his deep drawl.

‘Why not?’ Zara gave him a deadened look, still too traumatised to think beyond what she had just learned about her own body. ‘Don’t you think you’ve already done enough?’

In the face of that unnecessary reminder, Vitale stood his ground. It was a bad moment but in almost thirty years he had lived through an awful lot of bad moments and he would not allow himself to flinch from anything unpleasant. But for him the worst aspect was that this was an event outside his control and he liked that reality least of all. ‘I’d like to deal with this before I leave.’

Zara folded her arms and lifted her chin, suspicious of that particular choice of wording. ‘Deal with it?’ she questioned, astonished by the current of protectiveness towards her unborn child that sprang into being inside her and stiffened every defensive muscle. ‘I should tell you now—I’m not prepared to have a termination—’

‘I’m not asking you to consider that option,’ Vitale countered, exasperated by her drama, craving a sensible solution even though he already knew there probably wasn’t one. ‘You don’t trust me but I assure you that I will only act in my child’s best interests.’

Zara was unimpressed. How could she trust anything he said? How did she know that getting her pregnant hadn’t been part of his revenge? Hadn’t he accused her father of getting his sister pregnant? How much faith could she put in Vitale’s promises now?

‘That’s quite a sudden change of attitude you’ve had,’ she remarked in a brittle voice.

His lips set in a firm line, his eyes flaring bright and forceful before he cloaked them. Even though she tried not to, she found herself staring because, regardless of her hatred and distrust, nothing could alter the reality that he was sleek and dark and beautiful as sin.

‘Whether I like it or not the fact that you’re going to have my child does change everything between us,’ he responded darkly.

Zara released a tart laugh of disagreement. ‘Even though you believe that my father is the equivalent of a murderer and hate me for being his daughter?’