The Heat Of Passion

But she was scared now, scared enough to please even the most merciless sadist. Not scared for herself ... but for her father. An old-fashioned gentleman, who had grown up in a far different world from Carlo Saracini’s.

She came to a halt in front of the door and briefly closed her eyes. Crawl, she told herself. That’s what he wants. And if he gets what he wants, maybe destroying her father would seem less appealing. She knocked the door and braced herself. It was opened almost immediately by a young man.

‘Come in, Miss Amory,’ he said gravely.

The lounge of the suite was unchanged. Her fluttering gaze fell on an overstuffed lemon brocade sofa and helplessly she thought, It started there. Her skin burned.

She heard Carlo say something in Greek. The product of a marriage between an Italian and a Greek, Carlo was . equally at home in either language. Her spine stiffened. He strolled into view and the door slid softly shut behind her.

Jessica couldn’t take her eyes off him. He repelled her. Every earthy, oversexed inch of him absolutely repelled her and there was a certain deadly attraction to that amount of revulsion, she told herself. He moved with the grace of a prowling tiger. He had the face of a dark fallen angel and the stunning magnetism of a very physical male.

She studied the dark planes of his impassive features, the clear golden eyes set beneath winged black brows and the savagely high cheekbones which lent such fierce strength to his face. Her gaze glossed over the stubborn jut of a decidedly Greek nose and the wide perfection of his narrow mouth before hurriedly falling away.

‘I bet he’s a voracious lover,’ her mother had murmured throatily the first time she met him. ‘He has an incredible sexual charge. I could feel it fifty feet away... any woman with red blood in her veins would. What’s wrong with you?’

Jessica shivered. The red blood in her veins was chilling fast. Carlo was so cold. Although he betrayed nothing visually, she could feel that. And for some reason she couldn’t understand that made her feel physically cold and threatened.

Suddenly the silence was something she might drown in and she leapt into speech. ‘Why did you invite me here?’

‘Take off your coat.’

Her tongue crept out and moistened her dry lower lip. ‘I’m not staying—’

‘Go, then,’ he murmured with a dismissive flick of one lean hand. ‘You waste my time—’

Her teeth clenched. She undid her sash, dropped the coat off her shoulders and cast it aside. ‘I asked you why you invited me here.’

‘I wanted to look at you.’ Burnished golden eyes skimmed over her slender figure, resting on the surprisingly full thrust of her breasts above her tiny waist and sliding with insulting cool down over the feminine swell of her hips.

Jessica had never been at ease with her own body. Her voluptuous curves and her silver-blonde hair drew male eyes like beacons. Both attracted the wrong kind of male attention. She looked like her mother and she despised that awareness. If she hadn’t possessed a distressingly opulent shape and unnaturally bright hair which ironically was entirely natural, she would never have caught Carlo Saracini’s attention six years ago.

Her eyes glittered like brilliant amethysts as she withstood his inspection with her chin as high as she could hold it.

‘Would you like a drink?’ he drawled.

‘No, thank you.’

He poured himself a glass of champagne. ‘I hate to celebrate alone but I understand that you’re afraid of touching alcohol around me. I’m surprised you’re still that naive,’ he remarked softly.

‘What are you celebrating?’ She ignored the dig about alcohol, drawing on every scrap of icy dignity she possessed.

‘You’re a widow,’ he delivered with smooth emphasis.

Jessica was shattered by his can dour, brutally reminded that Carlo had no inhibitions and, similarly, little respect for ordinary standards of decent behaviour.

‘My father—’

Carlo straightened to his full six feet three inches and shifted a silencing hand, dark golden eyes gleaming over her pallor. ‘He stole from me and from his employees. We know that. Do we really need to discuss it?’

‘Do you have to be so callous?’ Jessica demanded, abruptly unfreezing from the spot to move forward in unconscious appeal. ‘He made a huge error of judgement—’

‘The prisons are full of people who make huge errors,’ Carlo incised, his nostrils flaring. ‘Theft? Such a sordid crime and yet so personal—’

‘P-personal?’ Involuntarily, she stammered.

‘It was for your sake alone that I bought Amory Engineering at an inflated price. What you might call a gesture of good faith towards your family—’

‘Good faith?’ A choked laugh fell from her lips as she studied him with unhidden loathing and disbelief. ‘You don’t know what good faith is. It was blackmail. You tried to put pressure on me by playing on my family’s financial position—’

‘I was demonstrating that I look after my own,’ Carlo cut in with ruthless precision.

‘Your own?’ she repeated with revulsion. ‘I was never yours!’

A winged ebony brow was elevated. ‘You were mine the first moment our eyes met but you were too stupid and craven to face that reality—’

‘How dare you!’

‘How dare you enter this room where you lay with me and try to deny what happened here between us?’ Carlo demanded with blistering contempt.

She wanted to hit him. She wanted to scream back from the depths of her humiliation. But she wouldn’t allow herself to be drawn. ‘My father—’ she said very deliberately.

‘Was the most cosseted employee I have ever had,’ Carlo interrupted. ‘I allowed him complete autonomy over a company which was no longer his and in return I expected loyalty, not common theft.’

‘He can sell his house and pay back every penny!’ Jessica swore furiously. ‘Isn’t that enough for you?’

‘Your family home carries two mortgages. Why do you think he stole?’ Carlo returned drily. ‘I wish to hear no more on the subject.’

‘He’s desperately ashamed of himself.’ Jessica hadn’t known that the house was mortgaged. She concealed her dismay with difficulty.

‘This subject bores me.’ Carlo sent her a grim glance.

‘I have no interest in your father except as a means to an end. You can’t influence my judgement with sentimental pleas. There is no sentiment in business—’

‘So you simply brought me here to gloat?’ she gathered with flashing eyes and a look of glowing scorn. ‘You make me sick, Carlo. I will stand by my father through whatever you throw at him—’

‘You like weak men, don’t you?’ he said silkily ‘Men who need mothering and support, men who make you feel that you’re the one in the driver’s seat. Maybe if I’d wept and plucked violin strings instead of demanded, you would -have come to me instead...’

‘Don’t be crass.’ Jessica was trembling with a rage that was becoming increasingly hard to control. ‘I would never have come to you. I hated you for your primitive macho outlook and—’

‘I am not primitive.’ The insertion was immensely quiet but the temperature had shot up. ‘I have Greek blood.’

For a split-second she was tempted to laugh. So vast an amount of blatant pride and arrogance dwelt in that assurance. But then she clashed with golden eyes that burned with the ferocity of a tiger about to pounce and all desire to laugh was stolen from her. Instantly the alarm bells rang in a frantic peal inside her head. That ferocious, utterly terrifying temper... She found herself instinctively glancing round to measure the distance to the door.

‘And you are not my equal. You proved that six years ago!’ he shot at her. ‘Most conclusively did you prove your stupidity—’

Her small hands clenched into fists. ‘If you call me stupid just one more time, Carlo, I won’t be responsible for what I do!’

‘Per Dio,’ he murmured with a brilliant, slashing smile. ‘If I push a little more, will you rip off my shirt and beg me to take you the way you did the last time?’

‘Dear God, how can you talk to me like that?’

‘Easily. Then,’ Carlo spread two very expressive hands, ‘I have no respect for you. What did you expect?’

The rage was beginning to gain on her self-control. She was having a very tough time holding it in.

‘You behaved like a whore—’

‘You swine!’ she positively spat at him, powered by a tremendous wave of aggression.

‘You were true neither to me nor to Turner,’ Carlo drawled with caustic bite. ‘He offered marriage. I offered something less secure. You went for the wedding-ring. And you lost.’

‘I married the man I loved ... I didn’t lose anything!’ Jessica slung back hotly, her adrenalin pumping madly through her veins.

Carlo threw his darkly handsome head back and laughed uproariously. ‘Are you telling me that you didn’t think of me in the dark of night? That you didn’t crave the passion I alone could give you? If you’d responded to him the way you responded to me, he’d have run away from you in terror!’

Jessica launched herself at him like a lioness. Two incredibly powerful hands snapped round her wrists and held her back. An insolent smile curved his hard mouth. ‘You dress like a fifty-year-old spinster but you’re a little animal at heart, aren’t you, cara? I scratch the surface of that ladylike exterior and I find teeth and claws. I like that. It excites me—’

‘You filthy swine...shut up!’ she screamed.

‘And it excites the hell out of you too!’ Long fingers hauled her closer as she attempted to kick him. He caught both flailing hands in one large male hand and pinned them behind her back, forcing her closer, staring with sardonic amusement down into her blazing violet eyes and pressing a long muscular thigh against her stomach as she twisted and tried to apply a well-aimed knee. ‘All that howling sexual frustration just begging to be released. I could take you now here ... up against the wall, on the floor, anywhere and you’d love it!’ he asserted with rawly offensive confidence. ‘Is that what you want?’

CHAPTER TWO

‘NEVER!’ Jessica gasped breathlessly, searing his dark, savage visage with all the tortured fury of her ignominious and powerless position. ‘The very idea of you touching me again makes me feel physically sick!’

‘One lesson wasn’t enough for you, was it?’ Carlo murmured huskily, narrowed eyes raking over her outraged features. ‘Don’t you remember what it was like when I made love to you?’

‘That wasn’t love,’ Jessica vented fiercely. ‘That was lust!’

‘And you have a problem with that... I don’t,’ Carlo confided in a black velvet purr. And then, with a sardonic laugh, he released her when she was least expecting the gesture and thrust her carelessly back from him.

Jessica was trembling and in considerable distress. She had lost control. Physical and mental control. And that terrified her. Six years ago, she had been twenty, barely out of the teen years and considerably more naive and foolish than she considered herself to be now. The last few minutes were like a blackout inside her mind. She didn’t want to examine them. He had made her so angry she had become violent and that knowledge literally filled her with shame and horror.

Her body felt peculiar. Her heartbeat was still madly accelerated. Her breasts were suddenly extraordinarily sensitive. She was maddeningly aware that the lace cup of her bra was chafing her nipples and that her skin felt stretched and tight. Horrified by what had happened to her body, she studied the floor, fighting to relocate her composure.

‘Let’s get down to business,’ Carlo suggested drily. ‘We’ve wasted enough time.’

‘Business?’ Her brow furrowed.

‘I invited you here for one reason only. You could be of use to me. I need a woman to play a role. A woman I can trust to play that role to the best of her ability and do exactly as she’s told. And I think that that woman could be you—’

Her lashes fluttered in bemusement. ‘I don’t think I follow.’

‘If you are prepared to place yourself without question in my hands for a period, not exceeding three months, I will consider treating your father’s offence with sympathy, understanding and forgiveness...’ Carlo stated quietly.

Sympathy, understanding and forgiveness. Alien emotions where Carlo was concerned. Her temples were throbbing. Her concentration was blown. She studied him with perceptible incomprehension, temporarily drained of all emotion. She just didn’t know what he was talking about.

‘This role,’ Carlo selected smoothly, letting champagne froth down into another glass. ‘It would entail considerable intimacy—’

‘Intimacy?’ she whispered shakily.

Carlo slotted the glass into her nerveless fingers. He surveyed her with immense satisfaction. ‘Intimacy,’ he repeated lazily, making a sexual banquet of the word and the long-drawn-out syllables were like a set of taunting fingers on her spine.

‘What... what exactly are you offering me?’ Jessica framed jerkily.

‘You would have to agree before I told you the details.’ Carlo dealt her a cool, steady glance, silky black lashes low over hooded, very dark eyes.

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘Unusual.’ Carlo shifted a broad shoulder in a slight shrug. ‘But I don’t trust you. Why should I? And it is not as though you have moral scruples, is it? And even if you had,’ he pointed out, ‘you do have your father to consider.’

She tensed, forcing herself to concentrate. ‘Are you talking about some kind of job?’

Carlo’s mouth curved wryly. ‘You could call it that.’ ‘And would it entail breaking the law?’ she prompter flatly.

‘What do you take me for, cara?’

‘Would it?’ she persisted.

‘No.’

Jessica cleared her throat. ‘You mentioned intimacy... were you talking about sexual intimacy?’ she pursued, tight-lipped and rigid. ‘Or was that just your idea of a joke?’

His strong jawline hardened. ‘There would be nothing remotely humorous about the exercise, that I can assure you. And yes, I was referring to sexual intimacy. The part you would play would not be credible without it.’

Dear heaven, why was she actually standing here listening to this nonsense? Her oval face set with distaste and rejection as her imagination ran absolutely rampant. Was he suggesting that she become some sort of business spy, sleeping with some competitor to gain information? An insane idea, but why else the secrecy? A kind of job that would last no longer than three months which would entail sex. How utterly revolting! A hysterical laugh clogged up her throat though. Her level of sexual experience lifted such a proposition to the heights of a tragicomic black joke...but then Carlo was not to know that.

Jessica threw back her shoulders. ‘Clearly you need a hooker

‘Madre di Dio...what are you saying to me?’ Carlo shot her a black glance of naked hauteur. ‘Are you crazy? I need a woman who can at the very least behave like a lady—’

‘And you don’t know any?’ Jessica cut in. ‘Now why doesn’t that surprise me? And how many beds are you expecting this lady to climb into at your request?’

Dark golden eyes narrowed. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

Jessica reddened, suddenly uncertain.

‘The only bed you would be expected to warm would be mine,’ Carlo spelt out very drily.

Jessica went white and looked back at him in disbelief. Setting down the untouched champagne, she reached for her coat with an unsteady hand. ‘Quite out of the question,’ she told him with bitter clarity. ‘I have no intention of selling my body to keep my father out of prison! Why the cloak and dagger approach, Carlo? Couldn’t you just have asked me to be your mistress? Well, the answer is no... no, no, no! I’d sooner take to the streets!’

Brilliant dark eyes raked over her impassively. ‘Go, then ... I have nothing more to say to you.’

‘But I’m not finished yet,’ Jessica asserted with venom. ‘Six years ago, you came into my life like a dark shadow and you tried to destroy it. There is no human being alive whom I hate more than you! And why did you set out to wreck my life? Out of nothing more than overweening conceit, selfishness and lust. It didn’t matter to you that I was engaged to another man or that I loved that man. It didn’t matter that you might hurt him as much as you hurt me.’

‘You hurt him, not I,’ Carlo returned without emotion. Jessica shuddered with the force of her own teeming emotions. ‘You set out to ruin our relationship—’

‘If you had truly loved him, I would have been without power. The power I had you gave me...’

Hot pink flushed her slanted cheekbones. ‘I did not!’

‘With every look, every breath you took in my radius. Your hunger drew me,’ Carlo condemned without conscience.

‘No!’ She stared back at him in stark distress and reproach, her father’s plight forgotten as he plunged her back into the past, heaping her with more guilt and an even greater sense-of responsibility for all that had gone wrong.

‘Did it give your ego a kick?’ Carlo sent her a look of blazing contempt. ‘You play with fire, you get burnt, cara:

Jessica’s knees felt like cotton wool. She was shattered by Carlo’s view of what had happened between them. He was accusing her of having encouraged him when she had fought his ruthless pursuit every step of the way. Only at the last when she was at the very end of her strength had she failed.

‘I came here and I shouldn’t have come.’ White and drawn, she turned away. ‘We hate each other, Carlo. I don’t think you realise the extent of the damage you did six years ago and I expect that even if you did you wouldn’t care—’

‘You walked away from me..

And it was still there, an intensity of disbelief and banked-down fury. She couldn’t understand the strength of his emotion after all this time. It wasn’t as though Carlo Saracini had fallen in love with her. Right from the beginning, it had been a rawly sexual wanting on his side. The way he looked at her, the way he touched her, the way he talked to her. Predator and victim. Passion and pain. That was what he had offered her. And she hadn’t walked away... she had run as if the hounds of hell were on her tail.

‘I still don’t think I deserve the offer you just made,’ Jessica breathed not quite steadily. ‘You sit there in your ivory tower, wrapped in all your money, and you have the sensitivity of a butcher where feelings are concerned.’ Tears stung her amethyst eyes but she held her head proudly high.

‘That is a gross untruth,’ Carlo slashed back at her rawly.

‘You walk over people. You manipulate them. You push them around. My father really liked you six years ago. You see, he couldn’t see through you as I could. Oh, yes, he thought you were a hell of a guy!’ she proffered in a choked voice of distaste. ‘But you don’t give a snap of your fingers for what he’s going through now, do you? All you can see is an opportunity to humiliate me further. And I will not give you that weapon, Carlo. You see, I have my pride too.’

He was pale beneath his naturally olive skintone but he wouldn’t give an inch. And she hadn’t expected him to. Censure rarely came his way. In receipt of it, he silently seethed, presumably thinking it beneath his dignity to defend himself against such charges.

Eyes as flaming gold as the heart of a fire burned her face. ‘Were you happy with him?’

On her passage to the door, she froze and slowly turned. He hadn’t absorbed a thing she had said. Pain dug lines of stress into her face. He was asking about Simon. She looked away. ‘He was my best friend,’ she said finally.

‘And this ... this being a best friend is your ideal of marriage?’ Carlo demanded, his usually fluent English curiously letting him down.

No, but it was what she had ended up with, she reflected sadly. Her troubled eyes slid back to him and collided with questioning gold and something twisted tight deep down inside her stomach. The atmosphere fairly throbbed with undertones. She stopped breathing, was sentenced to sudden stillness, every bone in her body pulling taut. For a split-second, she experienced the most extraordinary physical pull in his direction and resisted it with every last remaining drop of self-discipline. But that split-second shook her inside out.

‘I would have been your lover, your soul, your survival,’ Carlo gritted, and the anger was there, the anger she had feared, suddenly flaring up at her without warning in a blazing wall of antagonism that made her step back. Burnished golden eyes alive with derision and fury bit into her with a look as physical as a blow.

‘Get out of here,’ Carlo told her roughly. ‘Get out of here before I lose my temper and show you just how sensitive I can be!’

Jessica required only that one invitation. On unsteady legs, she backed out in haste. Out in the corridor, she closed her eyes and breathed in slowly and deeply. She felt bereft, alone, wretched, and the sensations were intense. Carlo confused her, cast her into turmoil. He always had. They were opposites in every way but just for a moment... for a strange and highly disturbing moment she had recognised an utterly inexplicably pang of empathy. She had wanted to put her arms round him.

Crazy, unbelievable, just one of those mad tricks of the mind when one’s emotions were on a high, she translated inwardly. After all, would she pet a sabre-tooted tiger plotting to put her on his dinner menu? But she could not escape the feeling that she had hurt him. And yet wasn’t that what she had always wanted to do?

When she was with Carlo Saracini she didn’t know herself. It had always been that way. With other people she was introverted and quiet, never bitchy or hot-tempered and certainly not violent. Dear heaven, she thought as she recalled the manner in which she had launched herself at him like a screaming shrew. He drew out everything that was bad in her character. He made her feel as though she could turn into a woman like her mother ... wasn’t that what frightened her the most?

She got into her car without remembering leaving the hotel. She didn’t start the engine. She stared out the windscreen unseeingly. The way she had felt when he touched her six years ago still haunted her. And every so often she made herself draw those memories out to reinforce her own disgust and shame. Not only did she look like her mother, she had found that she could behave like her too. That had been the most devastating discovery of all. That there was this weakness inside her, this ability to forget everything ... loyalty, self-restraint, even love... and lose all control in a man’s arms.

Sometimes, Jessica had even told herself that she ought to be grateful for that sordid incident with Carlo. She had been afraid then that if she didn’t remain constantly on her guard, virtually policing even her thoughts, she too might easily turn into a slut. If it hadn’t been for that noise next door, Carlo wouldn’t have stopped, she knew that. Sex was a terrifyingly powerful force if you knew yourself to be as vulnerable as Jessica felt herself to be. One weak moment in the vicinity of a male like Carlo and that would be that. She had been incredibly lucky to escape unscathed.

Only somehow, she thought now on a tide of bitter pain, it had never occurred to her that she might be just as unscathed six years on, after five years of marriage. Untouched by human hand. A virgin, no less. And wouldn’t Carlo just love to know that, she reflected painfully, shuddering at the very idea. He would find it hilarious.

Jessica drifted out of her thoughts to find herself sitting shivering inside a very cold car with all the windows fogged up. She drove off but somewhere down deep in her mind was an image of Carlo as she had last seen him in the hotel suite. Angry, contemptuous... bitter? What the heck did he have to be bitter about? Had he really imagined she would accept that grossly insulting offer? Three months in Carlo’s bed, working out her penance for daring to marry another man. What a monumental ego he must have! And the utterly peculiar way he had gone about making that offer ... Her head was thumping again, tension twisting through her like a steel wire.