Castellano's Mistress of Revenge

She tightened her lips until they went numb, anger bubbling inside her at his assumption of her as a gold-digger. It was so unfair. Why couldn’t he leave the past alone? To come to her now, after all this time, was going to achieve nothing but more heartache for her. It had broken her heart to walk away from him the first time. It had taken every bit of willpower and self-respect to do so. Living as his mistress had been so bittersweet and in the end she had chosen the bitter over the sweet. He had flatly refused to promise her anything but a short-term affair. The concept of marriage was anathema to him; now it seemed more so than ever.

Marc took an envelope out of his jacket pocket and handed it to her. ‘I have drawn up a legal document for you to sign,’ he said. ‘It states how much money I am willing to pay you to cohabit with me. By signing it you will be unable to claim support when our relationship is terminated.’

‘A prenuptial?’ she asked, frowning as her fingers took the envelope from him.

‘Without the nuptials,’ he said, his eyes diamond-hard. ‘No marriage, no children.’

Ava felt her insides twist in pain. Watching her sister go through the agony of not being able to conceive had made her acutely aware of how much she longed to have a baby of her own. To hear Marc state so implacably that he wanted no children struck at the heart of her. She was twenty-seven years old, which was still young enough not to panic, but with her younger sister’s fertility problems she couldn’t quite quell the worry that she too might not be able to conceive naturally.

‘I can assure you I would not for a moment think of bringing a child into such an arrangement as this,’ she said, turning away from Marc to put the envelope to one side.

Ava heard him move behind her and froze. She silently prayed for him not to touch her in case she betrayed herself. The skin along her bare arms crawled with anticipation of his warm, gliding hands. How many times had he embraced her from behind in the past? His hands would move slowly from her hips to her breasts, cupping her, his mouth nuzzling on the sensitive skin of her neck until she would turn in his arms and offer herself to him.

Her mind exploded with images of them together. The passion he had ignited in her was something she had never experienced before even though she had not been a virgin when they had met.

When his hands came to rest on her hips she shuddered. ‘You find my touch abhorrent, or is it that you are still hungry for it?’ he asked, his warm hint-of-mint breath skating past her ear.

If only he knew! she thought as her heart rammed against her sternum like a giant pendulum inside the body of a too small clock. ‘I told you…I…I want some time to think about this,’ she said, trying to keep her voice even.

He turned her around to face him, his eyes boring into hers. ‘You haven’t got time to think about it, cara,’ he said. ‘You have debts up to your diamond-studded ears.’ He fingered one glittering earlobe. ‘Did he buy these for you?’

Ava’s breath caught in her throat like a scrap of silk on a savage thorn. ‘Y-yes…’

His hands fell to his sides as he commanded, ‘Take them off.’

She frowned again, her stomach nosediving in alarm. ‘What?’

His mouth was bracketed by lines of steel. ‘Take them off and everything else he gave you. Now.’

Ava pressed her lips together to contain her pulsing panic. Was this really her Marc? The man she had fallen in love with so deeply and irrevocably? He was a stranger to her now, a terrifying stranger with not just revenge on his mind, but the total humiliation of her as well.

She would not give in to him.

She would not.

She tightened her hands into fists by her sides, holding his glacial glare with a feisty flash of her own. ‘No.’ Her voice came out too thready and soft, so she repeated it. ‘No. Absolutely not.’

His pupils flared, his mouth flattening even further. ‘I will give you one minute, Ava, otherwise the deal is off. Keep in mind the massive debts your husband left behind. At last count it was in the hundreds of thousands.’ He set the timer on his watch, his dark gaze holding hers challengingly. ‘Your minute starts now.’

She swallowed back her anguish, the determination in his eyes making the base of her spine rattle in fear. ‘D-don’t do this, Marc…’

A nerve flickered at the side of his mouth. ‘If you will not do it then I will do it for you,’ he warned.

Ava believed him well capable of it. Her hands began to tremble as she tried to remove the earrings, her fingers fumbling uselessly until she felt terrifyingly close to tears. She soldiered on, glaring at him bitterly, hating him with such intensity she could taste the acridity of it in her mouth. Finally she got the studs out and placed them on the coffee table to her right.

‘Now the rest,’ he said, standing with his feet apart, his arms folded across his chest in an authoritarian stance that boiled her blood.

Still glaring at him, she took each of her dress rings off and put them beside the earrings. ‘There,’ she said, arching one of her brows at him. ‘Happy now?’

His black eyes stripped her mercilessly. ‘Keep going.’

Ava’s heart lurched against her chest wall. She sent the point of her tongue out over her lips, buying for time, wondering if he wanted her to crumble emotionally, to beg and to plead with him to stop.

She would not do it.

She would not bend or break, she would not cry, she would not beg.

She raised her chin and locked gazes with him. Bluegrey warred with black-brown for a pulsing moment. ‘All right, then,’ she said with a devil-may-care lift of one shoulder as she loosened the catch on her watch. She slipped it off her wrist and placed it beside the earrings and rings.

She straightened and, giving him a challenging look, slipped off her shoes, kicking them to one side before she reached for the zipper at the back of her skirt. She told herself she had stood undressed in front of hundreds of people before while she had been modelling. This would be no different; besides, he had seen it all before. Her body was no secret to him. He knew every curve and contour and every secret place.

The tension in the air was palpable.

Ava slid the zipper down, the metallic sound thunderous in the crackling silence. The fabric slipped to the floor and she stepped out of its circle, her fingers going to the hem of her pull-on top.

Marc’s eyes followed her like a night-vision searchlight. She felt the heat of it scorch her flesh as her top joined her skirt on the floor. She stood before him in a black, French, lace push-up bra and knickers, her chin high, her right hip tilted in a model-like pose. ‘I bought these myself,’ she said with a defiant look.

His lips flickered, his dark eyes gleaming. ‘Prove it.’

Ava clenched her teeth, fighting to keep her cool. He wanted her to fall apart, she had to remember that. He wanted her pride any way he could get it. ‘I don’t have the receipt any more, so I am afraid you will have to take my word for it,’ she said, pushing up her chin to disguise its wobble.

‘Your word?’ His top lip lifted in a mocking curl. ‘Since when should I take as gospel the word of a gold-digger?’

‘I am not a gold-digger,’ she said with quiet but steely dignity.

The timer on his watch beeped, informing her the minute was up.

Ava felt her stomach slip as Marc’s gaze hit hers. ‘Well?’ he said.

She had never felt so naked and exposed in her life and yet she was still wearing more than most people wore on the French Riviera beaches she could see from the villa windows.

‘How much are you going to pay me?’ she asked, knowing it would be exactly the question a gold-digger would ask, but she was beyond caring. Serena was more important than her pride at this point. What her sister had suffered recently was far worse than anything Marc Castellano could do to her.

He named a sum that lifted her brows. ‘Th-that much?’ she asked in a croak.

He gave her an imperious smile, the black holes of his pupils flaring with passionate promise. ‘I am going to make you earn every penny of it, Ava. I don’t suppose you have forgotten how good we were together, hmm?’

Ava felt her cheeks flame with colour. She remembered everything: every touch, every kiss, every incendiary caress and every earth-shattering orgasm that had left her quaking in his arms time and time again. ‘You want some sort of medal for being able to perform an act that humans, even the most base of animals, have been doing for centuries?’ she asked with a cutting look.

He suddenly snagged one of her wrists and pulled her up against him, his chest to her pounding chest and his strong, immovable thighs to her weak, trembling ones. ‘Don’t push me too far, Ava,’ he said in a low growl. ‘I am this close,’ he held up his index finger and thumb a pinch distance apart, ‘to walking out of here and leaving you to face your sugar daddy’s creditors.’

Again Ava desperately wanted to call his bluff. She would have if it hadn’t been for Serena. A vision of her shattered sister, holding the ultrasound picture of the baby she had lost, was the only thing that stopped her. ‘All right,’ she said on an expelled breath. ‘I’ll do it.’

Marc’s hold loosened, but he didn’t release her. Instead his thumb found her thundering pulse, stroking over it in a rhythmic motion that was as powerful as a drug. ‘I will release a Press statement for tomorrow’s papers,’ he said into the silence. ‘We will begin living together as of now.’

Ava looked up at him in wide-eyed trepidation. ‘So…so soon?’

His eyes went to her mouth before returning to hers. ‘I have waited five years to have you where I want you,’ he said.

She gave him an embittered look. ‘Where might that be?’ she asked. ‘In the palm of your hand, begging for mercy?’

He traced a long finger over each of the upper curves of her breasts before dipping into the valley of her cleavage, the nerves beneath her skin going off like miniature explosives. ‘I think you know exactly where I want you,’ he said in a tone that was rough and deep and sensually, sinfully dangerous.

Ava felt her body quiver at the thought of him plunging into her, claiming her as his.

Not in love.

Not in mutual attraction.

But in lustful, hate-filled revenge.…

Chapter Two

IN SPITE of the warmth of the room Ava felt her skin rise in goose pimples. She rubbed at her upper arms, trying so hard to hold her ground. Her head was aching with tension, her mind trying to stay clear and focused while the earth seemed to be shifting beneath her feet. The air was fizzing with Marc’s hatred, high-voltage waves of it zapping at her, making her skin pepper all the more.

‘Are you cold?’ Marc asked.

She kept her mouth rigid with anger. ‘What is that to you?’

He held her glare for a pulsing moment. ‘Have you had dinner?’ he asked.

‘No, and if you think I am going to dine with you dressed like this you can think again,’ she said with a lift of her chin.

He smiled as his gaze raked over her again. ‘Delightful as that sounds, no—I will not take you out in public like that. As of this evening your body is for my eyes and my eyes only.’

Ava found it hard to stand still for the rage that was rumbling through her like seismic activity preceding a massive earthquake. ‘You know there are probably street workers who come much cheaper than me,’ she said, goaded beyond caution.

‘Yes, but I want you,’ he said with a devilish gleam in his black-as-night gaze. ‘We have unfinished business, do we not?’

Ava glared at him. ‘Any business we had ended five years ago. I thought I had made that perfectly clear.’

His top lip lifted in disgust. ‘Oh, yes, by moving out of the apartment I had set up for you without even telling me to my face. I came home to find the place empty apart from a note.’

Ava felt a twinge of guilt about not meeting him face-to-face back then, but she knew if she had he would have persuaded her to stay with him. A note had seemed safer, she’d had more control, the sort of control she had lost the moment she had met and fallen in love with him. She had been so weak where he was concerned, and, although she had put it down to her youth at the time, seeing him again frightened her that it might very well happen all over again. She had come full circle. The irony of it was beyond painful; it was like a razor blade stuck sideways in her throat. She felt as if she could taste the blood of its embedment, the bitter, metallic taste of regret and heartbreak at what she had lost by leaving him, and yet here she was, back in his life and under his command.

Ava lowered her gaze from the accusing glare of Marc’s. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, but it came out grudgingly and not at all convincing.

Marc watched as she stood before him with her bottom lip trembling, her heart-shaped face pale, and her grey-blue eyes like lakes of shimmering liquid.

He turned away, his anger making his movements stiff and jerky. He clenched and unclenched his hands, wanting to punch deep holes in the walls in frustration and fury. It sickened him that he had allowed her to drop his guard. For years he had sworn he would not do as his father had done: become totally captivated by a woman who couldn’t be trusted.

His mother had slept her way through his childhood with an array of other men until she finally left the family home when Marc was seven years old. He could still recall the last time he saw her at the age of ten, getting into the top-of-the-range sports car of her latest rich toy-boy lover, waving at Marc as they drove off to their deaths three hours later on the Amalfi Coast. He had spent the next decade of his life trying to prop up the shattered shell of his father until death—with the aid of large amounts of alcohol—had finally claimed him.

Marc had waited for five years to avenge his bludgeoned pride against Ava McGuire. Five years of meticulously planning his revenge. Step by step he had rebuilt his empire, taking the greatest pleasure in finally bringing Douglas Cole to his knees, with a little help from the stock-market volatility.

Of all the people for her to marry, Ava could not have chosen a better way of ensuring Marc hated her for life. He loathed thinking about his arch enemy making love to her. His mind revolted at the thought of that bloated body heaving over her slim form. But then she was a gold-digger who would always sell herself to the highest bidder. She had just proved it by the way she had agreed to his terms. She had openly taunted him with her beautiful body, but he was not going to take what was on offer until he was good and ready. He wanted her, it was like a virulent fever in his blood, but he was not going to give in to it until she begged him to make love to her. But this time around it would not be making love; it would be sex, nothing but pure physical need that he would enjoy until he tired of her. She would not be the one to walk out on him the way his harlot of a mother had done to his father. This time around Marc would call an end to the relationship when he was satisfied he was over her.

He turned from the view at the windows and faced her. ‘I want this placed stripped of everything that belonged to Cole,’ he said. ‘I have a removals van waiting outside to take everything away in order for my things to be brought in.’

Her slim throat rose and fell over a swallow. ‘There’s not much left of Douglas’s things,’ she said. ‘Since the funeral I have sorted through it all and sent it to his ex-wife and children. The furniture came with the villa when he purchased it.’

‘You have met his ex-wife and family?’ Marc asked, his brows lifting in mild surprise.

She swept the point of her tongue across her lips, swallowing again. ‘Yes, at the funeral. They came all the way from Perth in Australia. Mrs…’ She hesitated for a fraction of a second before continuing, ‘Renata Cole was very pleasant. Adam and Lucy, his adult children, too, were very gracious.’

‘Considering their father had shacked up with a tart,’ he said, watching as her cheeks bloomed with colour.

‘Is this to be part of the deal between us?’ she asked with a defiant spark in her grey-blue eyes. ‘For you to insult me at every available opportunity?’

He ignored her comment to say, ‘You will no longer be using Cole’s name. It is in the legal document I gave you. You are to revert to your maiden name even though you are anything but a maiden.’

She opened her mouth to protest, but he cut her off curtly. ‘Go and get dressed. I have made a booking at a restaurant for dinner.’

Her eyes rounded. ‘You were that sure I would agree to this preposterous plan?’

‘But of course, ma belle,’ he said with a mocking smile. He patted where his wallet was inside his suit jacket pocket. ‘After all, money is the thing you most desire, is it not?’

Her eyes were like twin tornadoes, darkening with fury. ‘Doesn’t it make a difference to know I don’t want it for myself?’ she bit out through tight lips.

He gave a couldn’t-care-less shrug. ‘It is of no importance to me what or who you want it for. I understand the thickness of family blood even though I do not have a sibling. As it stands, I am happy to pay you to entertain me, but only until such time as I feel it is time to call it quits.’

The look she gave him would have sliced through steel. ‘You mean when you’ve ground my pride into the dust.’

Marc moved his lips from side to side, reining in his temper. She had some nerve to lament the damage to her pride, considering what she had done to his. ‘I have already told you to go and get dressed,’ he said. ‘I would advise you to do so and now, otherwise I may very well change my mind and take you dressed as you are.’

She turned with a swish of her shoulder-length blonde hair and padded up the sweeping staircase, the action of her endless legs and neat bottom making the blood surge to his groin.

He shoved his hands deep in his trouser pockets to stop himself from reaching for her as he so often had done in the past. He’d had lovers since, but no one made his blood heat the way Ava McGuire’s did. All she had to do was look at him from those smoky grey-blue eyes of hers and he was rock-hard. He sucked in a harsh breath, fighting against the flood of memories, but it was impossible to mentally sandbag against such powerful sensual recollections. For five years they had tortured him, making him ache with the need to feel her again, to have her in his arms, to hold her and have his fill of her.

He ran a hand through the thickness of his hair as he paced the floor again. He would get her out of his system this time once and for all. Whatever it took, he would do it.

He had to in order to move on with his life. This was his last chance and he was going to make the most of every single minute.

Ava dressed in a slim-fitting black cocktail dress from her short-lived modelling days and, slipping her feet into heels, picked up a small evening bag.

She glanced at her reflection in the mirror, grimacing at the state of her hair. She put her bag down and quickly ran a brush through her tresses so they fell about her shoulders in casual waves. Apart from a dusting of mineral make-up and a quick dab of lip gloss she left the rest of her face alone. It wouldn’t matter what she did to herself—she was never going to be good enough for Marc Castellano, she thought with aching sadness. He enjoyed the company of beautiful women all over the world, women who willingly grasped at the chance to hang off his arm or slip between the sheets of his bed. Ava’s stomach hollowed in anguish at the thought of how many had been there since she had been his mistress. The thought of him touching others the way he had touched her made her feel as if her heart was being wrenched in two. She had tried over the years not to think of it; every time she saw a Press photo of him with yet another glamorous woman on his arm she had quickly turned the page, suppressing the wave of longing until it finally subsided.

When she came down the stairs, Marc was speaking to a man who was dressed in a removals company uniform, the first of some items already placed in the foyer in cardboard boxes.

Ava’s stomach clenched at the thought of how quickly things had changed. Marc had wasted no time in taking possession of the villa; how soon would he insist on the other more intimate terms of the deal? In the past she had shared his bed with love, or at least on her part. But how could she possibly share it with the hatred that bubbled like volcanic mud between them now?

Marc dismissed the man and turned as she came down the last of the stairs, his dark gaze running over her in hot-blooded appraisal. ‘Very nice,’ he said. ‘But then you have always had the amazing ability to look glamorous in whatever you are wearing—’ his eyes glinted as he added ‘—or not wearing.’

Ava hoisted her chin at a haughty height. ‘In case you are wondering, this dress is mine.’

‘Yes, I know,’ he said. ‘I recognise it from our first meeting.’

She tried to hide her reaction to his statement, but it was almost impossible to control the flip and flop and flutter of her pulse. That he remembered such a minor detail made her wonder if he had cared more for her back then than he had let on at the time. He had always seemed so aloof and non-committal when it came to his feelings. She on the other hand had been effusive with stating hers, which had made her feel gauche and immature. She wished she had been a little more sophisticated back then. If only she had been able to look upon their affair as a casual fling she might not have had her hopes crushed so badly. But from the moment their eyes had met across a crowded bar she had felt something fall into place deep inside her. No one else had had that effect on her and after all this time she had come to the conclusion no one else ever would.

Ava followed him out of the villa to a waiting car outside. The driver held the door open for her and waited while she took her seat, with Marc joining her, his long, strong thighs brushing against hers.

He took one of her hands in his, holding her lightly, but with an undercurrent of strength that silently warned her not to try and pull away.

Ava thought of all the times they had dined together in the past. The romantic candlelit dinners where she had gazed into his eyes, his fingers lazily stroking hers, making her heart thud in anticipation of returning to the apartment to make love into the early hours of the morning.

She wondered if he was thinking of those times now. It was so hard to tell what was going on behind the hard mask of his face. He was just as heart-stoppingly gorgeous as before. The faint shadow of regrowth on his jaw made her fingers itch to touch him, to feel that sexy stubble under the soft pads of her fingertips. Her body trembled at the memory of how it had felt to feel his unshaven skin against her inner thighs as he pleasured her with his lips and tongue.

She crossed her legs, trying to quell the pulse of her body, but with him sitting so close it was like trying to stop ice melting under the flare of a blowtorch.

Marc lifted her hand to his mouth, the point of his tongue dipping between the sensitive web between her index and thumb. It was the merest touch, a hot, moist hint of what was to come. Ava shivered and closed her eyes tightly, calling upon every bit of willpower she possessed not to turn in her seat and place her mouth greedily against his.

He kept her hand in his, idly toying with her fingers, outlining the smoothly manicured shape of her nails. Ava was intensely aware of her forearm resting on his muscular thigh, her hand so close to the hot, hard heat of him she ached to explore him, to see if he was responding to her as she was to him. Her eyes glanced sideways, her heart nearly stopping when she saw the tenting of his trousers. She gulped and quickly looked out of the opposite window, but she heard his low deep chuckle, and felt his fingers tighten as they brought hers to his growing erection.